In 969 the Fatimids conquered Egypt, founding the city of Cairo in the hope of establishing a Shiʿi caliphate over the entire Muslim world. Although they quickly conquered Palestine and Syria, their universal aspirations were dashed, and by their demise in 1171 they ruled only over a much-diminished realm in Egypt. The sources for the Fatimid period are unusually rich and varied, including Muslim and Christian chronicles in Arabic and hundreds of thousands of medieval documents from the Jewish community, along with Persian and European travelers’ accounts. Museums and church treasuries filled with luster-glazed ceramics, diaphanous textiles, astounding rock-crystal ewers, and exquisitely carved ivories and wooden panels excite art historians, and almost three dozen Fatimid-era buildings in Egypt alone, comprising large and small mosques, tombs, shrines, minarets, and fragments from the royal palaces, were meticulously measured, planned, photographed, and studied by K. A. C. Creswell in the first volume of...

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