Dynastic History | The Saadian Tombs, Marrakesh — Sealed Off, Then Surveyed in 1917

In 1917 the French protectorate's Service des Beaux-Arts cleared, surveyed and opened a walled necropolis behind the Kasbah mosque. The account usually given credits an aerial photograph with showing what lay behind the wall. The site had never been unknown in Marrakesh; what changed that year was who controlled the way in and who wrote the description.

The older half is a square chamber that Abdallah al-Ghalib raised between 1557 and 1574 over his father Muhammad al-Shaykh, the Saadian founder, who died in 1557. Ahmad al-Mansur added loggias and a larger southern room, then between 1591 and 1603 built a second mausoleum for himself: the Chamber of the Mihrab, the Chamber of the Twelve Columns and the Chamber of the Three Niches. The middle room is about ten metres square and twelve high, its twelve columns Carrara marble — the same import route that supplied the palace a few hundred metres away. Al-Mansur's mother Lalla Mas'uda, who died in 1591, and Moulay Zidan, who died in 1627, are buried here as well.

Burials continued after the dynasty ended. The Alaouite sultan Moulay Ismail, who reigned from 1672 to 1727, sealed the necropolis off from most of the buildings around it. IRCICA counts roughly sixty Saadian graves inside.

Reading the room is straightforward once you know the trade: the marble is imported, the zellij and carved plaster are local work, and the inscriptions running around the walls are the family's own account of itself, commissioned by the man buried under them.

📸 Cover: the Chamber of the Twelve Columns, with the marble cenotaphs, Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons