City
Babylonia
Alt-Kairo (Miller) · Fostat, Cairo (Barrington)
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Babylonia lay where Old Cairo stands today, a fortress on the east bank of the Nile that goes back to a Persian foundation in the sixth century BC. Its name is the Greek form of an Egyptian place name, though the Greek geographer Strabo explained it with Babylonians who had settled here by leave of the pharaoh. He called it a naturally strong fortress, home to a legion. The map splits its pair of towers and lets a branch of the Nile run between them, as excavations confirm. From here a canal, reopened by Trajan by AD 112, led to the Red Sea.