In 1549 a Venetian printmaker, Matteo Pagano, published a large engraving of an aerial view of the city of Cairo; it was accompanied by a Latin text ("Descriptio Alchiriae") written by the orientalist scholar, Guillaume Postel. The depiction of the city is sufficiently accurate to permit a detailed interpretation of the city to be made, and it remained the standard western representation of this fabled eastern city for the next 250 years. Nicholas Warner provides a context for Pagano's view of Cairo, a translation of Postel's text, and a commentary on the contents of the engraving itself in addition to the accompanying narrative. An index of subsequent revisions, and a superbly produced enhanced facsimile of the engraving itself is included. Volume 1 (208 pages) includes 36 large color plates, 5 black-and-white plates, and a modern facsimile of the original Latin text "Descriptio Alchiriae"; Volume 2 (208 pages) includes 68 black-and-white images, all details of the map. Volume 3--the map--is a "modern facsimile" of the original Map, i.e. with blemishes, etc. removed, packed in a slip case. It is the same size as the original, and folds out in a similar manner to an ordnance survey map. It is printed in two colors to match the original.

The True Description of Cairo: A Sixteenth-Century Venetian View (Studies in the Arcadian Library) 3 Volume Set

Arts & Photography

Warner, Nicholas

History & Criticism

The Arcadian Library

The Gayer-Anderson Museum is housed in the Bayt al-Kritliya, a sixteenth-century merchant’s house that stands adjacent to the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun in one of the oldest quarters of Cairo. In the 1930s the house served as the home of R.G. Gayer-Anderson Pasha, an English doctor and art collector, who furnished it with his collections and left it to the Egyptian government in 1945. The house and the collection together then became the Gayer-Anderson Museum, which remains open to visitors to this day. This updated guide to the museum is illustrated with black-and-white photographs and includes complete floor plans.

Guide To The Gayer-Anderson Museum

History

Africa

The American University in Cairo Press

Comprising thirty-one maps at a metric scale of 1:1,250 and a descriptive catalogue, The Monuments of Historic Cairo marks the first time that the city’s significant architectural heritage has been mapped in ground plan within the present-day urban context. The work surveys an area of nearly six square kilometers, stretching from the city’s northern walls southward to the Mosque of Ibn Tulun and the Citadel. It documents an extraordinary variety of historically important monuments, and includes street patterns that have now disappeared but that are crucial for understanding how the city has developed over the course of more than a thousand years. The catalogue provides historical information about more than 500 key buildings situated in the historic core of Cairo (one of the first cities inscribed on the World Heritage list), and includes scholarly bibliographical references, as well as details of each building’s conservation history. More than 200 buildings are documented here for the first time. The Monuments of Historic Cairo records the city’s urban fabric and its architectural treasures, enhancing our understanding of the morphology and architecture of one of the world’s great historic cities. This volume is part of the American Research Center in Egypt Conservation series.

Monuments of Historic Cairo: A Map and Descriptive Catalogue (ARCE Conservation)

Americas

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