The incredible ancient skyscraper city that's 500 years old and made of mud

You might think that skyscraper cities are a recent development, and in the Middle East that they are only found in the glassy towers of Dubai, but you’d be wrong. In the centre of Yemen, which boarders Saudi Arabia and Oman, the walled capital city of Shibam is famous for its towering constructions.

When Freya Stark, a British Italian explorer visited Shibam in the 1930s, it reminded her so much of cities she had seen in the west that she coined the Yemeni city “the Manhattan of the Desert”. Unlike the concrete jungle of New York however, Shibam’s towers are built out of mud and have been standing for hundreds of years. Over time the mud bricks wear away with the force of the elements, and because they need constant minor replacements, giving an exact date to the structures is difficult.

Over hundreds of years remarkably little has changed and in The Old Town of Sana’a most of the towers are still inhabited by residents.

These dusty coloured high rises stretch up to seven stories, or 30m high - the same height as the earliest skyscrapers in Chicago, the BBC reports. Fertile ground which surrounds Shibmam provided the perfect building materials. Soil, hay and water form a mixture which is shaped into bricks and left to dry and harden in the sun.

Then instead of using scaffolding, the early builders would lay a stone foundations before adding layers of mudbricks and floors as they went.

The architectural feats are considered so unique and impressive that Shibam, as well as the city of Zabid and the Old City of Sana’a, are recognised UNESCO World Heritage Sites which aims to protect the tradition which dates back to at least the 8^th and 9^th century.

However, these natural wonders are facing damage from every direction. A 2008 tropical storm flooded Shibam and damaged several buildings. 12 years later a 2020 survey of 8000 towers in Yemen conducted by Unesco found that 78 were on the brink of collapse.

It is not only nature that is threatening these historic mud skyscrapers, when the latest Civil war broke out in 2014, UNESCO added several cities to a list of endangered world heritage sites. Historic buildings in Sana’a in the west of Yemen suffered significant destruction because of heavy bombing.

At the same time, Yemen’s history of high-rise tower houses was “the need for security against invading forces, as well as during times of local tribal dispute or civil war,” Trevor Marchand, a professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, previously said.

But these ancient buildings skills are facing extinction, Salma Samar Damluji, author of The Architecture of Yemen and its Reconstruction, told the BBC: “We are looking at structures that can stand for up to 300 years and more, Six and seven storey budlings built out of sun-dried mud brick in a way that no contemporary architect can build today.”