Shibam

Travelling through the Hadhramaut valley in the 1930s, the British writer Freya Stark came over the dunes and found she had no ready word for what was in front of her. In the middle of the desert, on an otherwise empty valley floor, stood hundreds of narrow buildings many storeys high, leaning against one another. The comparison she reached for has been attached to Shibam ever since: the Manhattan of the desert.

It is an easy comparison with something misleading in it. Manhattan went up in steel. Shibam went up in mud. Mud brick — sun-dried earth and straw, the most ordinary material available in the region — carried to eight storeys is still a subject for engineering textbooks.

Why It Grew Upward

Shibam sits on slightly raised ground at the edge of the Hadhramaut's seasonal flood channel. That position imposes two things at once. When the rains come, the valley floor goes under water, so the dry ground is limited. And going beyond that limited ground was not safe; you stayed inside the town walls.

A settlement that cannot spread sideways goes up. Shibam's houses run from five to eleven storeys and some approach thirty metres. The streets are narrow, the houses share walls, and the whole town fits into roughly five hundred metres by four hundred.

The way to reach that height in mud brick is to make the wall very thick at the bottom and thin it as you climb. On the ground floor the walls run up to about a metre; at the top they are half that. The buildings therefore taper slightly as they rise — barely visible from a distance, and the reason they are standing.

The interior follows the same logic. The ground floor has no windows: storage and animals. Above it, grain. The living floors begin higher up, and the topmost rooms take the coolest air of the day and the view. It is a house a family occupies vertically, with a single narrow stair shaft connecting every level.

A Town That Needs Constant Maintenance

Mud brick does not survive rain. Shibam's answer was not to change the material but to systematise the upkeep. The outer surfaces are re-rendered with mud at regular intervals, and the most exposed upper sections are finished in white lime. In photographs of the town, that white band across the tops of the buildings is not decoration; it is protection.

If the maintenance lapses, a building begins to dissolve over a few years. Which means that for as long as Shibam stands, the people living there have to remake it every year. The town being five hundred years old does not mean its bricks are.

Most of the present town dates to the sixteenth century. In 1532 a major flood carried away a large part of the earlier settlement, and the town was substantially rebuilt after that disaster. Shibam as a place goes back much further; this stretch of southern Arabia lay on the incense trade routes.

The Unknown Detail

Shibam's houses adjoin one another and in many places share walls. That has an odd consequence higher up: the roofs and upper floors of neighbouring buildings are connected in places by passages. In part of the town you can go from one house to another without ever coming down to the street.

This had a practical function. The narrow lanes below were public space; the upper level was largely where women moved, and these passages made it possible to visit a neighbour without going out into the street. The town has two separate circulation layers — one at ground level, one across the roofs.

Today

Shibam was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1982. Severe flooding in 2008 brought down several buildings and weakened the foundations of many more. Conditions of conflict in Yemen have made both the maintenance work and the supply of materials harder; the town was placed on the list of World Heritage in Danger in 2015.

The risk here is different from that at most historic settlements. What threatens Shibam is not visitor numbers or development pressure but the interruption of upkeep. If a house goes unrendered for a few years, it can be lost past recovery. Whether the town stands depends directly on people continuing to live in it.