The World's Oldest Skyscraper City — the UNESCO Old City where eight-storey mud-brick tower houses with alabaster windows have stood for 2,500 years, qat-chewing merchants fill the Bab al-Yemen souk, and the call to prayer echoes between 103 mosques from dawn to dusk
Sana'a is the capital of Yemen and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth — settled for at least 2,500 years and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986. The Old City (Al-Qadim) is the most intact example of ancient Islamic urban architecture in the Arabian Peninsula: roughly 6,500 tower houses of four to eight storeys built from rammed earth and fired brick, decorated with geometric white gypsum friezes and coloured alabaster windows (qamariyya) that filter light into kaleidoscopic interiors. The buildings were engineered to stay cool in Yemen's hot plateau climate (Sana'a…
Sana'a appears in Islamic tradition as having been founded by Shem, son of Noah — a legendary origin that speaks to how ancient the city feels to its inhabitants. Archaeological evidence confirms continuous habitation since at least 500 BCE. The city became an important centre of pre-Islamic South Arabian civilization (the kingdoms of Saba/Sheba, Himyar, and others) before converting to Islam in 628 CE — reportedly one of the earliest cities to do so, when the Prophet Muhammad sent his cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib. The Great Mosque was built within years of the conversion. Sana'a reached its cult…