CAIRO 5,500 YEARS

A Cairo sequence, from its inception on the banks of the Nile, where its strategic position controlled agriculture and territory, to its fifty-fifth century, when ""the conquest of the myth that Egypt must be ruled by non-Egyptians was as significant as the conquest of the Nile."" Desmond Stewart (author, Young Egypt, co-author, Babylon: A Portrait of Iraq) traces the story of the city down the ages through the Cairenes, the invaders (Persian, Greek, French), its rulers, particularly the mamelukes, to Nasser's Egypt (scanted). Sprightly in tone, but neither amplifies nor innovates.