It has been said that many of Cairo's residents know little about the Fort of Babylon, though certainly the
Christians do, because several of their oldest churches are built into or on its walls. These include El-Muallaqa (the Hanging Church) and the Greek Church of St. George. A number of other
Coptic churches are nearby. The area is called Old, or Coptic
Cairo (Masr el Atika), for this is indeed the oldest part of the city, and the remains of the fort are Cairo proper's oldest original structure. Indeed, Cairo owes its existence to this fort.
However, the ancient Egyptians were conscious almost from the start that this region, on the borders of Upper and Lower
Egypt and originally two independent kingdoms, was the most strategic site in all of Egypt. Of course,
ancient Memphis, which was just south of modern Cairo, existed from at least the beginning of the unification of the two kingdoms, and was considered the "balance of the Two Lands". Though various rulers at different times moved the capital of Egypt to different locations in Egypt, it always seems to have returned to this strategic location.
In fact, double faced stone implements have been discovered in the gravel beds of the Abbasiya quarter in the northern part of Cairo, indicating that early human activity took place here. However, it is not until the Neolithic period, toward the end of the sixth millennium BC, that we find human settlements near the apex of the delta.
Yet, by the time of Fort Babylon, human occupation on the east bank of the
Nile in this area other than Babylon itself was confined to a bastion, Tendunyas (Arabic "Umm Dunayn"), a cemetery, Heliopolis several kilometers to the north which was then only a small town, and a few monasteries such as that of Theodorus (Dayr Tadrus).
