The Nile River plays a main role in the Egyptian life as the sole sustainable source of fresh water, so Egyptians have always sought to regulate the Nile through the years by inventing water systems suitable to the Nile’s behaviour. This began after the Islamic conquest with the restoration of the canal that linked the Babylon area to the Red Sea-originally funded by the Roman emperor Trajan-at the behest of Caliph’Omar as a way to link Egypt to the rest of the Islamic Empire (Al-Sayyad, 2011). Additionally, water has a high value in Islam to the extent that Muslims inherited and invented many ways to deal with water resources, either rivers or rainwater, through advanced techniques and calculations (Soliman, 2014). Muslim rulers paid attention to water as a sign of power and control, so they were keen on irrigation systems in Delta and Upper Egypt to supply fresh water to the cities all year-Cairo and its citadel in particular. This paper discusses the practicality and suitability of current information to enable the use of virtual heritage to interrogate, analyze and visualize the heritage of water resources management and operational systems in the medieval city. In doing so, this paper presents and analyzes the credibility of current knowledge and information on water heritage in Cairo in terms of what benefits the use of virtual heritage modelling, and visualization techniques would afford them.
