Cementerio fatimí de Asuán

Arab troops took Aswan, the Greco-Roman Syene, in 641-642; the town guarded Egypt’s southern border and was the seat of the governorate of Upper Egypt until the 11th century⁴. In the first centuries of Islam, Egyptian and North African pilgrims gathered here before crossing the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea port of Aydhab and sailing to Arabia⁴. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities counts the town’s cemetery, on the east side of the city, among the oldest in the Muslim world, with burials from the 2nd century AH to the Mamluk period². It once ran more than 2 km from north to south, a size Björnesjö and Speiser compare with Cairo’s City of the Dead⁴.

Edward Lane, who visited in 1820, described an “old Arab Cemetery” of mud-brick tombs, plastered and whitewashed, many with cupolas, which local people called the cemetery of the Companions of the Prophet⁴. After a heavy rainstorm, several thousand Kufic tombstones were moved in the 1890s to storerooms in Cairo and to the Aswan Museum⁴. Since the 1930s urban growth has erased at least three quarters of the necropolis; its best-preserved southern part is known as the Fatimid Cemetery⁴. UNESCO inscribed it in 1979 as the “Islamic Cemetery”, one of ten components of the Nubian Monuments^1,3. From 2006 to 2014 a German Archaeological Institute team mapped and partly restored it with Egypt’s antiquities authorities^4,5.

The South Necropolis covers about 600 by 500 m of rose granite bedrock, itself an important quarry field in Pharaonic and Greco-Roman times; to the east it reaches the quarries of the Unfinished Obelisk^4,5. A road built in the 1960s cuts it in two: in the western part the larger monuments, mostly martyrs’ tombs or mashhads, stand on the heights, while the fenced eastern part holds two large groups of tombs on a gentle slope⁴. The DAI team found 30 of the 31 mausolea recorded by Ugo Monneret de Villard in the 1920s and recorded 17 more, 47 in all, besides about 350 ordinary tombs⁴; the institute’s project page gives a far higher figure, over 500 mausolea⁵. The Ministry lists among its main buildings the dome of the seventy-seven walis and the mashhads of al-Sharif Hasan, al-Sharif Haydara, Abbasa bint Khadij, al-Sada al-Ja’afira, Zaynab bint al-Hanafiyya and Sayyida Amna².

Most tombs are of mud brick and were plastered and whitewashed⁴. Björnesjö and Speiser define eight types, from graves outlined by a single course of rough stones to stepped or vaulted covers and box-like vaulted chambers built on the bare rock; most have a raised platform at the south end with a small niche marking the direction of Mecca⁴. According to the Ministry, the cemetery saw the first attempt in Egypt to build domes over tombs, in the Fatimid period². Firm dates are rare: a tombstone reused in the masonry of mausoleum M10 names a woman who died in 415 AH (1024), so the building is later, and a fragment still in place in M9 is dated 500 AH (1106)⁴. Rising groundwater now threatens the mud-brick fabric⁶.

Visitors see the north end of the fenced eastern section, where a path marked by red-brick ground elements, with ten information points, crosses a zone of about 100 by 60 m⁴. Here the DAI team consolidated six mausolea and a small sabil, or water store (M6), and rebuilt the lost domes of mausolea 113 and 114 from surviving traces and by comparison with other domes⁴. In complex M7 a mausoleum adjoins a prayer hall of two aisles whose vaults fell long ago; only its mihrab was rebuilt⁴. Burials in the necropolis resumed in the 1950s, and families visiting their dead, funerals and bridal processions still cross the site, some of whose mausolea are venerated as saints’ tombs⁴.