Astronaut Jessica Meir captured from ISS Cairo, the capital of Egypt.
Cairo is part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world, and the Middle East. The Greater Cairo metropolitan area is the 12th-largest in the world by population with over 22.1 million people. The area that would become Cairo was part of ancient Egypt, as the Giza pyramid complex and the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis are near-by. Located near the Nile Delta, the predecessor settlement was Fustat following the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 next to an existing ancient Roman fortress, Babylon. Subsequently, Cairo was founded by the Fatimid dynasty in 969. It later superseded Fustat as the main urban centre during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (12th-16th centuries). Cairo has since become a longstanding centre of political and cultural life, and is titled “the city of a thousand minarets” for its preponderance of Islamic architecture. Cairo’s historic center was awarded World Heritage Site status in 1979.
The local scenery on the ground is as follows.
Reference: Jessica Meir’s Tweet
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