Old Sana'a
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How it came to be
Sana'a lies in a mountain valley at 2,200 m and has been inhabited for more than 2,500 years. It was a military centre of the Sabaeans, whose inscriptions name the Ghumdan Palace, and later an important centre of the Himyarite kingdom.
According to early Islamic sources, the Prophet Muhammad ordered the Great Mosque built around 630, and it is known as the first mosque outside Mecca and Medina. In the 7th and 8th centuries Sana'a became a major centre for spreading Islam, and the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I enlarged the mosque between 705 and 715. In 1972 workers repairing an attic wall in the mosque found a mass of old manuscripts and parchment, including the Sanaa palimpsest, one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts.
The old city has more than 100 mosques and over 6,000 houses, many of them multi-storey tower houses of rammed earth. Inscribed in 1986, it was added to the List of World Heritage in Danger in July 2015 after serious damage in the armed conflict. UNESCO reported that the al-Qasimi neighbourhood was particularly badly hit and that the 12th-century al-Mahdi Mosque and nearby houses were also affected.
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