Housing in Pre-Islamic Arabia

Last updated: April 30th, 2025 at 12:42 pm · Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes

Late pre-Islamic Arabs used to live in a variety of facilities. They included semi permanent tents; temporary tents; houses, qasr (qaṣr قصر); and palaces

Semi-Permanent Tents

Nomads used to live in semi-permanent shelters. They have not left any archaeological traces of their camps. An account from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry demonstrates why it was almost impossible for a camp to survive for archaeologists.

Still to see are the traces at ad-Dafīn, and in the sand-slope of Dharwah, the sides of Uthāl; Al-Maraurāt and as-Slahīfah are empty, every valley and meadow once full of people.
The abode of a tribe whom past time has smitten;

their dwellings show now like patterns on sword sheaths.
Desolate all, save for ashes extinguished;

and leaving of rubbish and ridges of shelters.
Shreds of tethering ropes, and a trench round the camp;

and lines plotted out, changed by long year’s lapse.¹

Temporary Tents

Whenever Arabs went on a military expedition, they pitched temporary tents. This was also true for the night stay on commercial travels. Probably, they used the same kind of tents for the travel for pilgrimage.

Here is an account from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry about a temporary shelter made for men on expedition:

Many a tent in whose sides the fresh wind blows;
in a spacious country, the door of which is never closed.

Its awning made of worn-out embroidered garments;
while the inner covering is of striped Athami cloth.

Having for ropes the halters of short-haired horses;
straight like lance-shafts, returning from a first or second raid.

Such tents have I raised over men both young and hoary;
whose lances cause blood to flow from the enemies’ veins.”²

Houses

The settled inhabitants of Arabia favoured stone or mud-brick dwellings. The nomads might have used them as well during their sojourn in towns.

Archaeologists have discovered numerous houses meant for commoners of that time. Such houses had four to five rooms with an enclosure for carrying out the trade household was engaged in. For example, storage room for dates and juice collecting system.

Qasr

Qasr (qaṣr قصر) is frequently mentioned lodging in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and in early Islamic sources. How it looked exactly, we can now only guess. No poetic or archeological evidence survives which could give any descent details.

Early European travellers have left some accounts. Doughty, a 19^th century traveller to Arabia, describes qasr he came across as follows:

The high-walled court or kasr of this ground was a four square building
in clay, sixty paces upon a side, with low corner towers. In the midst is

the well of seven fathoms to the rock, steyned with dry masonry, a
double camel-yard, and stalling of kine and asses; chambers of a slave-woman

caretaker and her son, rude store-houses in the towers, and the well-driver’s
beyt ….. an only gateway into this close was barred in nightfall. Such

redoubts – impregnable in the weak Arabian warfare, are made in all outlying
properties. The farm beasts were driven in at the going down the sun.³

An earlier traveler of 12^th century, Ibn al Jubayr, denotes qasr as ‘the kind of stronghold known in these parts (Arabia) as a qaṣr, ‘a large enclosure containing small buildings.’⁴

Definitely, these narratives are about later age qasrs but probably, pre-Islamic qasr was not fundamentally different. It can also be assumed that such enclosures belonged to the rich and might be located at suburbs of towns. Actually, there is a house excavated at Architectural Pile E of Rabadha which is quadrangular in shape and has four towers on the corners.⁵ It could be example of qasr.

Palaces

Kings and kinglets of pre-Islamic Arabia constructed magnificent palaces to reside. None of them has survived for the archaeologists to analyse. Their accounts have survived in historical texts.

One of the palaces, located at Sana’a and known as Ghumdan, was used by Himyar kings. It was reputedly destroyed by Caliph Uthman. 10^th century Arab geographer Hamadani, who had a chance to see its ruins, has described it:

Foremost among the palaces of Yemen and having the most
remarkable history and the most widespread reputation is

Ghumdan … [the ruin of] which still stands in Sana’a … Ghumdan
was twenty story high, one on top of the other. … at each of the

palace’s four corners stood a copper statue of a lion. These were
hollow so that whenever the wind blew through them a voice similar

to the actual roaring of lions would be heard…. The palace was a
four-sided edifice, one of which was made of white stones, the

second of black, the third of green and the fourth of red. On
the top of the palace was a room that had several windows,

each made with a marble frame and ebony woodwork, with
silk curtains. The roof of the room was made of one single slab

of marble.⁶

Similar palaces were at Hira. An observer at court of the Lakhmids reports. What can I hope, when Muḥarriq’s [i.e. lakhm] house has gone to decay and left their palaces void? What better, after Iyad?; The folk who dwelt in [the palaces of] khawarnaq and Bariq and as-Sadir, and the high-pinnacled palace that stood beside Sindad…; Now sweep the winds over all their dwellings: empty they lie, as though their lords had been set a time; and no more to be; yea, once they lived there a life most ample in wealth and delight beneath the shade of a kingdom stable, not to be moved;⁷

Footnotes

‘Abid ibn al-Abras. The Dīwāns of ‘Abid ibn al-Abraṣ, of Asad, and ‘Āmir ibn aṭ– Ṭufail, of ‘Amir ibn Ṣa’ṣa’ah, ed. and trans. Charles Lyall (Leyden, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1913), 34 (ode 11).
Tufail ibn ‘Auf, The Poems of Tufail ibn ‘auf Al-Ghanawi and At-tirimmah ibn Hakim At-Ta’yi, ed. and trans. Fritz J. H. Krenkow (London: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1927), 1.
Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (London: Jonathan Cape, 1888, Repr. 1927), 417.
Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Jubayr. The Travels of ibn Jubayr: Being the chronicle of a mediaeval Spanish Moor concerning his journey to the Egypt of Saladin, the holy cities of Arabia, Baghdad the city of the caliphs, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and the Norman kingdom of Sicily, ed. and trans. Roland J.C.Broadhurst (London: Johathan Cape, 1952), 215.
‘Umar. Sa’d bin Abdulaziz Al-Rashid, “The discovery of Al-Rabadha,” in Roads of Arabia, ed. ‘Ali ibn Ibrāhīm Ghabbān, Beatrice Andre-Salvini Francoise Demange, Carine Juvin and Marianne Cotty, (Paris: Louvre, 2010), 438.
Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad al- Hamdani. Al-iklīl: Al-juz’ al-Thāmin, ed. Nabih Amin Faris, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 15, 24-25. (The book is in Arabic).
Al-Mufaḍḍal son of Muhammad. The Mufaddaliyat: An Anthology of Ancient Arabian Odes, Vol. II, ed. and trans. Charles J. Lyall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), 161, Ode no. 44, poet: Ya’fur ibn Aswad.