There are eighteen images in Kairo which are directly taken from other sources, all with minimal alterations, if any. Some of these are famous and instantly recognisable, whereas others are highly obscure. In general, pictures match the theme of the room they are contained in. This is discussed more specifically in each section below.

This is a work-in-progress. Of the eighteen pictures, three are not yet identified. Their content might be known, but the exact image they were sourced from has yet to be found. Any help identifying these is very much appreciated.

The three are:

Two dice, possibly made of wood.
Coinage, possibly ancient Chinese.
An organic molecule, the lowest part of which is cytosine, and which is largely made up of several linked sugars.

Following A Complete Guide to Kairo, the first pictures encountered are in the Dead Garden section. There is a Japanese woodblock, a Greek vase, and a Greek sculpture. They all have sport as a theme, which is fitting considering the puzzle in this room requires timed running about to solve.





The largest image is called Chiyoda Castle (Album of Men). It is a 1897 Japanese woodblock by Toyohara Chikanobu. It shows a competition in traditional Japanese archery, known as Kyudo.






The next image is from an ancient Greek vase, dating to 525 BCE, depicting olympic athletes running.








The smallest and rightmost image is a copy of the ancient Greek statue Discobolus, which portrays an athlete poised to throw a discus.

The next image you'll run into, following the guide, is the Japanese one up on the balcony. This is a woodblock by Kitagawa Utamaro from 1793 which shows five women playing the traditional Japanese game of go, a strategic board game similar to chess but of higher complexity.


The hexagon design on the base of the game board is not in the original picture. It was added by the makers of Kairo to show the solution to a separate puzzle, garden secret.

The next area in the guide is the gallery. There are four pictures here, all themed around chance or fortune in some way. This is almost certainly due to the nature of the puzzle in this room, which is solved by sheer chance rather than strategy.



The first picture here is a statue of Hotei Buddha, sitting in the rubble at Sendai, Japan after the damage had been inflicted by the major tsunami of 2011. The photo is was taken by The New York Post. It could be argued that Buddha represents faith and the destruction caused by the natural disaster represents exceedingly bad fortune.




The second picture is of an 18th century edition of French playing cards, "Les Cris des Paris" ("The cries of Paris"), made by Grimaud in France. It depicts various merchants peddling their wares by crying out as a form of self-advertisement, which was common at the time the cards were published. Card games in general, although they might require some amount of skill, invariably involve some degree of blind luck or chance.





























This section is unfinished--the exact origins of the remaining two pictures have not yet been determined.

After the gallery comes clockworks. This room contains a multi-step logic puzzle, and as a result, the four pictures herein are themed around logic and intelligence.






The most widely recognisable image is that of the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955 CE). This picture in particular is from a 1947 photograph of him. Among many highly esteemed achievements, he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, which has allowed the development of modern quantum theory.



Next to Einstein we have a less well-known diagram of part of a Boolean logic circuit. In Boolean logic, each choice is considered to have only two possible outcomes (e.g. "yes" or "no", "on" or "off", "blue" or "not blue", etc.). This is the basis of all modern programming and has allowed the development of digital electronics. This particular diagram is from a lecture[users.ece.gatech.edu] at Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. It has been filled in black presumably because the thin lines would be hard to see otherwise.



On the adjacent wall, there are two more pictures. The first is taken from the painting Aristotle, by Francesco Hayes, painted in 1811. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was an ancient Greek and is held to be the first great scientist of ancient times. Among other things, he wrote extensively on a range of topics, including physics, ethics, philosophy, biology, zoology, etc. More pertinantly, he is considered the father of logic. He wrote the first ever study of formal logic, the Organon.



Next to Aristotle is a picture, hard to make out through the static, of the Ahmes Papyrus (also known as the Rhind Papyrus) of Ancient Egypt. It was purchased by Henry Rhind in 1858, who subsequently brought it to the British Museum for study. The Ahmes Papyrus dates to the 17th century BCE. Its author, known as Ahmes, copied it from a yet older text, from around the 21st century BCE. It is written in the Egyptian hieratic script and is a work on arithmetic, dealing mostly with fractions and geometry, and providing example problems for students. The whole papyrus is 33cm tall and over 5m long, making the entire work the equivalent of an Ancient Egyptian mathematical textbook.

After the gallery, there is the gym. This room involves a lot of running on treadmills to solve the puzzles, so appropriately, the two pictures here are both about toil.






The first picture is of a pyramid of some sort. It is actually a still from the film 10,000 BC, depicting the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, an act which famously used decades of hard work from innumerable slaves.































The other picture is an artwork by Titian, painted in 1548-1549, called Sisyphys. First mentioned by Homer in 800 BCE, Sisyphus was a mythological figure who was punished by the gods for wrongdoings. He was forced to move a heavy boulder up a hill, but when he finally reached the top, the boulder would always roll back down and he would have to begin again, repeating the task forever. Sisyphus represents endless striving and long, pointless tasks.

After completing all the parts of the upper tower, stairs appear in the upper tower hub. When you climb to the top of these, you are whisked up through the air to security, the summit, and the garden. Before reaching these places, however, three images rotate around you quickly for a few moments as you rise through the air. The third image remains unidentified, however, the other two are themed around fundamental human discoveries.



The most widely recognised image is Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man from 1490. This diagram shows human proportions and their relation to elementary shapes: a man standing spread-eagle can be perfectly inscribed in a circle with the centre of the circle at his navel, whereas a man standing as though on a crucifix can be inscribed in a square. The drawing is often used to refer to the innate symmetry and beauty of the human body and the universe.



Another image that zips by is this picture of some DNA. This is not just any picture of DNA, however. It is taken from James Watson and Francis Crick's ground-breaking paper, Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids, published in Nature in 1953. This paper described, correctly and for the first time ever, the structure of DNA, the fundamental molecule of all known life.



The final image is a molecule. It's also seen up on the balcony after you press the big button--a projection of it travels around the walls very quickly. So far, this molecule is unidentified, except that it is obviously organic, contains what appears to be cytosine at one end, and is otherwise made up of seven linked ringed molecules which appear similar to sugars.