El Qasr - Timetravel to a Medieval Islamic City

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Dear readers, today I take you with me on a journey through the time after the pharaonic period in Egypt. The Dakhla oasis that I presented you two posts ago has many more interesting historical places worth visiting and in this article, the Ancient City of El Qasr is our destination.

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A City with a Great History

El Qasr is – beside Mut – the second city in the Dakhla Oasis. For those who missed the previous posts (see here and here), I strongly encourage you to have a look at them as they give an introduction to the location and history of the oasis. As a short reminder and for your orientation you can find the map of most of the oases in Egypt below.

_{A map of Egypt with the most important oases.}

El Qasr was built around in the medieval/ottoman time (around 13th century A.D.) and belongs to the most important cities dating back to the early Islamic period. It is completely made of natural mudbrick and is mostly very well preserved. An interesting fact is that a few hundred people still live in this kind of buildings and give visitors a natural smile.

_{Entrance to the Medieval Islamic City made of pure mudbricks.}

El Qasr in Detail

A central spot within the city is the Sheikh Nasr Edeen Mosque in the south of El Qasr. It was created in the traditional Ayyubi style. The mosque is about 7x9 meter in a rectangle shape with a pulpit of mudbrick. A door left to the entrance leads to the mausoleum with the body of Sheikh Nasr Edeen.

_{The minarett of the mudbrick mosque Sheikh Nasr Edeen.}

_{Within the mosque.}

_{The mausoleum of Sheik Nasr Edeen.}

The flourishing city of El Qasr was once the home of thousands of people that mostly lived from agriculture. Their tools are still preserved such as the succulents – a two-step device to produce finest olive oil. The first step was done by a device to probably remove the seeds of the olives (the "juicer"). It was possibly driven by animals. In the second part, the olives were crushed. A pottery vessel in front of the device that was made of wooden clogs caught up the oil from the squeezer.

_{The succulent was used for producing fines olive oil.}

Another mechanical device was used for grain processing. This you usually can see only in ancient movies about the desert, but this device still works! I show you here a very small clip of how people produced flour in ancient times.

_{Sorry for filming in portrait mode. I am still learning. ;)}

_{Grain processing in detail.}

_{Grain processing in detail.}

Traces of education and other parts of the social life are still visible such as the "madrassa" – which was once a school for Qur'an students and contained a huge library. Later on, it became a courtroom. Two chambers for prisoners waiting for their trial (one for males and another one for females) are directly connected with the courtroom.

_{The court (and former school).}

_{Another view to the court hall.}

El Qasr has very narrow streets. This special architecture is built foremost to keep the inner city cool during heat waves in summer and also to protect it from being "flooded" with sand when the annual sandstorms are coming.

_{Fresh air is blown through the narrow streets and shadow is luxury in the midday heat.}

_{Buildings could have up to three floors.}

_{Although it is all built of mudbrick there are only a few cracks in the walls.}

Spolia in El Qasr

Another interesting fact is that the inhabitants of El Qasr used limestone blocks from ancient temples such as Amheida (also located in Dakhla). These blocks are so-called spolia, which is of Latin origin spolium and literally means "robbed" or "looted from the enemy". The use of spolia is not new to the Islamic period. Already in ancient times, for example in Tanis, the City of Psusennes the II, spolia were found from Quantir, the city of Ramses II.
It was not always some kind of disrespect to older rulers and their buildings, but often also just a form of "recycling".

_{Spolia: re-used limestone blocks from the Amheida Temple next to El Qasr.}

A Strange Species – Fruit Bats

There is a quite unique population of bats flying around in the ancient city of El Qasr, consisting of around 2.500 fruit bats. These animals belong to the species of the " rosettus aegyptiacus" or also called "megabats". A pair of a male and a female fruit bat usually deliver only one baby a year. They live – as their name suspects – only on fruits and sometimes harm food stocks of the people by this habit. The fruit bat population is the only one beyond the tropes, therefore it is currently researched by a team of specialists from Egypt, Czech and Lebanon.

Do you want to know more about El Qasr? Feel free to ask questions in the comment section and let's discuss! :)

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_{Sources:
• Information from the local visitor's guide.
• On fruit bats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_fruit_bat
• http://www.egypt.travel/attractions/al-qasr/
• Further reading on spolia in Egypt: https://www.witpress.com/elibrary/ha-volumes/1/3/1224
• Further reading on the egyptian oases in general: Boozer, Anna Lucille, Frontiers and Borderlands in Imperial Perspectives: Exploring Rome's Egyptian Frontier, In: American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 117, No. 2 (April 2013), pp. 275–292. DOI: 10.3764/aja.117.2.0275}

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_{Image sources:
• Map of Egypt (edited by the author): Source CC BY-SA 3.0
• Egyptian Fruit Bat: Source CC BY-SA 3.0
• All other photos and video taken by myself on 4th Jan. 2018.}

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If you liked this article, please follow me on my blog @laylahsophia. I am a german Egyptologist writing about ancient and contemporary Egypt, history of science, philosophy and life.