Cairo Meets the Automobile

In the 1920s the motorcar reached the streets of Cairo — gliding past Opera Square and along Qasr el-Nil, weaving between tramlines and horse carriages. Egypt met the automobile a century before this room was built. The story was already on its way home.

Cairo in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan capital of tramlines and turrets, opera and river light. Electric trams had run since 1896; now motorcars threaded among them, past Opera Square and down Qasr el-Nil, carrying pashas, merchants and the royal court. Egypt was among the first countries in the region to take the automobile into its streets.

This is the chapter that belongs to us. The story of the automobile is not a foreign one here — it arrived on Cairo’s avenues a full century ago and never left. What began beneath the city’s khedival façades finds its continuation, one hundred years on, in New Cairo.