Sibam: one of the World's Wonders

Although its origins are still not completely understood, it was trading at the time of the Sabaeans around the fourth and fifth centuries BC.

Most of Shibam dates back to the 9th or 10th Centuries or even older than that. While Shibam has been in existence for an estimated 1,700 years, most of the city's houses originate from the 16th century.

It was an important caravan halt on the spice and incense route across the Southern Arabia.

It became the capital of Hadhramout after the destruction in AD 300 of the earlier capital Shabwa and the earliest written reference to it is found in an inscription dating to this period.

All the houses in Shibam are made of baked, mud bricks.

The tower houses have been designed this way so that the inhabitants would be protected from Bedouin attacks.

Some might assume it to be a mirage. Rising out of the desert in the South Arabian Peninsula, ancient high-rise apartment buildings made of mud meet the eye. Centuries before the modern age of skyscrapers dawned in Chicago and New York, the Middle East had its own skyscraper city – the oldest on earth.

It is the city's towering appearance that prompted Freya Stark to describe it as "the Manhattan of the desert".

Abandonment of the old agricultural flood management system in the wadi, the overloading of the traditional sanitary systems by the introduction of modern water supply combined with inadequate drainage, together with changes in the livestock management have all contributed to the decay of the city.

The domestic architecture of Shibam including its visual impact rising out of the flood plain of the wadi, functional design, materials and construction techniques is an outstanding but extremely vulnerable expression of Arab and Muslim traditional culture.

The most distressing potential threat facing the city is flood, which might be at any time, detrimental to both the integrity and the authenticity of the old city, as it was during the disastrous flood of October 2008.

Shibam bears witness to the cultural identity of the people of Wadi Hadhramout and their former traditional way of life.

The old walled city of Shibam and Wadi Hadhramaut constitute an outstanding example of human settlement and land use. The domestic architecture of Shibam is an outstanding characteristic example of houses in the Arab and Muslim world. The rigorous city planning based on the principle of vertical construction is exceptional and an example of a traditional but vulnerable culture.

In Shibam there are some mosques (The Jam'ia Mosque in the center, dates largely from the 8th or the 9th or the 10th century AD), two ancient sultan's palaces, a double monumental door and more than 500 buildings which rise 5 to 11 stories high, separated or grouped, but all made uniform by the material of which they are constructed: baked clay.

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