The Nobel-winning Egyptian writer was 94. His “city was teeming Cairo, and his characters were its most ordinary people: civil servants and bureaucrats, grocers, shopkeepers, poor retirees, petty thieves and prostitutes, peasants and women brutalized by tradition, a people caught in the upheavals of a nation struggling through the 20th century. Around their tangled lives, Mr. Mahfouz chronicled the development of modern Egypt over five decades in 33 novels, 13 anthologies of short stories, several plays and 30 screenplays.”