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The Horse Carriage: A Class Motif in Egyptian Popular Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2025
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This essay is part of a larger research project on the intersection of music, animals, and social class dynamics in Egypt. It draws on a fieldwork encounter that I had in Cairo in April 2022 with Salih, a horse-carriage driver, and his horse Ziko (Fig. 1). Together, they operate what is known in Egypt as ḥanṭūr (pl. ḥanāṭīr), a lightweight four-wheeled horse-carriage, which, designed with a front seat for the coachman, one or two double passenger seats in the back, and a foldable leather hood, is often rendered as the Egyptian version of the English Victoria or the Italian Botticelle. Indeed, the ḥanṭūr is widely believed to have first been introduced to Alexandria in the mid-19th century by Italian immigrants, who constituted the city’s second largest European population at that time.
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References
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18 The figure of the downtrodden carriage driver grappling with the effects of rapid urbanization also appears in other films from the broader region during this period. One example is the Turkish film Umut (Hope, dir. Yilmiz Güney, 1970), which tells the story of Cabbar, a poor buggy driver and rural migrant in southern Turkey’s Adana whose horse is killed by a motorist; see Gordon, Joel, “Three Tales of Obsession: Crosscutting Boundaries in Middle Eastern Film,” History Compass 14, no. 2 (2016): 49–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.