Egypt · 16th century
The Fortress of an-Nekhel is a Ksar (castle) located in the Nekhel Municipality of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It holds a strategic location at the exact center of the peninsula. Excavations at the site have revealed remains dating from Ancient Egypt. It has historically been an important stop and staging ground for Muslim pilgrims undertaking the Hajj or Umra, holy Muslim pilgrimages.
A fortress was built on the site by the Circassian Mamluk sultan Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri. A group of Christian pilgrims (including Felix Fabri) in 1483 recorded that there was a great well at an-Nekhel which was called the "Well of the Sultan" because during the pilgrimage season the Sultan employed a man with two camels to draw water all day for the pilgrims. The Frenchmen were on their way to Saint Catherine's Monastery and avoided the well due to uncertainty of the reception they might receive.
The existing fortress was built by Sultan Selim in the sixteenth century, following his invasion of Egypt in 1517. "Moorish" soldiers were stationed to protect the pilgrims who came from Egypt, Morocco, Algiers and Spain.
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who visited the site in the first decade of the 19th century, reported a large building with stone walls and no habitations around it. There was a large reservoir for the pilgrims filled from a brackish well. The garrison consisted of about fifty soldiers and the fort was used as a magazine to provision the Egyptian Army in its expeditions against the Wahabis.
In the nineteenth century, when the route was still used by pilgrims, the road was infested with hyenas, dabba, which fed on the dead camels which had fallen by the wayside. If very hungry, packs were known to have attacked solitary travelers. The residents of an-Nekhel would not leave the village at night for fear of attack, and kept dogs to frighten off the scavengers.
An explorer at the beginning of the 20th century describes it as a square fort on "absolutely barren ground", built as a place to provide Haj pilgrims with water. It was manned by an officer and ten soldiers; a village around the fort consisted of fifteen to twenty houses inhabited by ex-soldiers and their families. All food was transported from Gaza or Suez, though the villagers cultivated small patches of ground with corn and maize when Wadi el-Arish flooded.
Text adapted from “An-Nekhel Fortress” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
An-Nekhel Fortress ranks #4,511 of 9,079 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #24 of the 37 mapped in Egypt. Founded 1517, it is older than 42% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 891 atlas entries founded in the 16th century. See how Egypt compares in the castle statistics.
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