Why it looks like this

Giza is the west-bank half of greater Cairo, a dense carpet of streets filling the green Nile floodplain. The map's drama is at its western edge: the city ends in an almost straight line where the valley floor meets the desert plateau — and on that plateau, a few hundred metres from apartment blocks, stand the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx.

The contrast is the whole story of Egypt in one frame: 4,500 years of monuments on the dry plateau, and every street, field and building crowded into the narrow watered valley below.