Ajdābiya

The city of Ajdābiya, known as ‘the barren city’, is located on the western edge of Cyrenaica, 18km from the Mediterranean coast. The city played an important role in the Middle Ages and continues to be of significance because of the archaeological remains from the Fatimid Caliphate.

The city, founded during the Roman period, was identified in Corniclanum, which is marked on the Peutinger Table (copy of a Roman map); a garrison of soldiers from Syria was stationed there at the time. The only elements that have survived from that era are some Greek inscriptions and reused blocks that were used to build the Islamic city.

Ajdābiya was conquered in 643, shortly after Barqah, by the Arab armies under the leadership of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ. The city offered little resistance and capitulated after concluding a treaty with the Muslim armies, and agreeing to pay a tribute of 5,000 dinars. It seems that the Berber tribes who lived in the region, in particular the Lawāta, soon converted to Ibāḍī Islam, as did part of the Maghrib. However, the city reached its height in the tenth century. In 914, it became part of the Fatimid Empire of Ifriqiya during the dynasty’s first attempt to conquer Egypt. The city acted as a frontier post and bridgehead until the Fatimids’ definitive conquest of the territory in 969. Because of its many wells on the edges of the Syrtis desert, Ajdābiya was an active caravan centre at the intersection of the routes from the Maghrib to Egypt and from the southern Sahara to the Mediterranean. The city, which did not only depend on commerce and tax collection for its survival, also had access to the sea via a port, referred to in medieval sources as al-Mahūr and identified in the small coastal town of Zuwaytina, 36km to the north-west. The Arab geographers at the time described Ajdābiya as a city built from sundried clay bricks, with baths, caravansaries, and markets. It is possible that the city was surrounded by a wall of unbaked clay that had disappeared by the twelfth century, when al-Idrisi wrote his geographical texts. Like all the cities in the region, the city had begun a process of slow decline after the Hilālian invasion in the mid eleventh century and the collapse of the Fatimid Empire.

The medieval city’s remains, which were still quite imposing when the French traveller Jean-Raymond Pacho visited them in 1824, have been excavated in recent decades and restored with the help of the drawings he produced. The remains consist primarily of a fort, identified as the governor’s palace and located, a little out of the way, to the north of the city. It is a rectangular building with four corner towers and square projections in the middle on each side. This building, which has a central court and is surrounded by a portico, has traces of a bent entrance on the northern side and five oblong vaulted rooms to the south. The central room with an iwan, which has been partly preserved, was used for gatherings held by the master of the dwellings.

The other major edifice is the great mosque, built by the Fatimid caliph al-Qā’im (reigned 934–946), and which is now located in the heart of the protected archaeological tell in the south of the city. It was excavated in the 1970s and its plan was reconstituted. It is a building in local limestone and sundried clay bricks with an abundant use of Roman and Byzantine blocks. This place of worship, which follows the tradition of Fatimid mosques, is rectangular in shape and, to the north of the prayer hall, there’s a paved courtyard with a portico, at the centre of which is a cistern. The octagonal minaret, whose original shape had attracted the attention of travellers in the Middle Ages, has now disappeared; only the square base, on which it originally stood, is still visible in the north-west corner.