Fatimid Cemetery, Aswan
A hillside of medieval mud-brick domed tombs on the edge of Aswan — one of the oldest Islamic cemeteries in Egypt.
A medieval necropolis
The Fatimid Cemetery of Aswan spreads across a rocky hillside on the southern edge of the city, beside the Nubian Museum and the ancient granite quarries. It is one of the oldest Islamic cemeteries in Egypt, used from the ninth century onwards and especially during the Fatimid period of the tenth to twelfth centuries, when Aswan was an important frontier town and a station on the routes to Nubia and to the Red Sea port of Aydhab on the pilgrimage road to Mecca.
Domes of mud brick
The cemetery contains dozens of mausoleums of mud brick, many crowned with small domes resting on squinches, some decorated with simple niches and openings. Built for local notables, scholars and holy men, they form one of the largest surviving groups of early Islamic funerary architecture in Egypt and are important for the history of the dome in Egyptian Islamic architecture. Many tombs carried inscribed tombstones, a large number of which have been studied by historians and some of which are displayed in museums; some tombs are still venerated by local people as the shrines of saints.
Visiting
The cemetery is open to view from the paths that cross it, and it is often visited together with the Nubian Museum and the Unfinished Obelisk nearby. The tombs are fragile, and visitors are asked not to climb on them.
Exhibo editorial
Most people see it only through the car window on the way to the Unfinished Obelisk: a hillside of crumbling earth-coloured domes, dozens of them, like a village of small beehives in the desert light. Stop and walk in.
It is quiet, slightly melancholy and very old — a thousand years of Aswan's dead, scholars and saints and merchants, under domes that taught later Cairo builders how to roof a tomb. Go in the late afternoon when the mud brick turns gold, walk respectfully on the paths, and look out over the rooftops towards the Nile.
Gallery
How to find it
The cemetery lies on the hillside opposite the Nubian Museum, on the road towards the Unfinished Obelisk, about 10 minutes by taxi from the Corniche. Paths lead up from the road among the domed tombs.
