Memory of the Roman town

6From the very first visits, the uniqueness of the old town is visible in the contrast between the regularity of the main lines of the town plan and the picturesque nature of its urban landscape. A study of the origins of the plan provides the first elements of understanding.

7Flavia Neapolis was founded in the 1st century (72/73 AD) in the Nablus Gorge.10 It is located 1.5 km west of the ancient Canaanite town of Sechem (19th century BC), 12 km from the ancient town of Sebastia and 68 km north of Jerusalem. The Roman town was built on the site of Mabarta, an ancient settlement from the Hellenistic period about which little is known other than the permanence of its water supply.11 The foundation of the town by Titus, under the reign of Vespasian, was certainly not without strategic significance.12 Titus had just quelled the first Judaean revolt in Jerusalem and the Roman power took advantage of this to increase its direct hold on the region.13 The site is well positioned. It had the advantage of natural springs14 and was at the crossroads of the routes from Egypt to Damascus, from Philadelphia (modern-day Amman, Jordan) to Caesarea (Caesarea-Maritime, Israel), from Jerusalem to Ptolemaïs (modern-day Acre, Israel). At the foot of the Gerizim, the location facilitated the control of the regional population in a Roman Palestine that remained troubled by insurrections until the violent repression of 135 AD.15 Here, as elsewhere, the Romanisation of Palestine was not limited to the military occupation of the territory. It was played out, as we have seen in Bethlehem, in the competition between religious sites. In Nablus, under the reign of Hadrian (117–137) a temple was built to Zeus.16 At an altitude of 850 m, i.e. more than 300 m above the town, it competes with the Samaritan religious institutions at the top of their sacred mountain.

8Archaeological excavations have uncovered some structural elements of the plan of Flavia Neapolis.17 The main decumanus was discovered in the south-east, in the large open space of the al-Qaysariyya quarter (fig. 6), under the present Zafir al-Masri school. An aqueduct, accessible by a stairway from the Roman road, coming from the spring of ʿAyn Dafnâ (1000 m to the east), passes 14 m below. The large slabs that cover certain stretches of it suggest that it may have been dug as an open channel during the Hellenistic period, then covered by the dust of an earthquake. This hypothesis that would suggest that the Roman town was built on the traces of the Greek town. The aqueduct, after crossing the decumanus, continues and then branches off to serve the site of the great mosque, where it probably supplied the Byzantine basilica that stood there,18 or even an ancient temple.19 The remains of a Mameluke wall aligned with the decumanus testify to the permanence of the route during the 13th and 14th centuries.20

9The springs guaranteed an abundance of water. A sophisticated and ramified network of canals, natural or hewn out of the rock, and underground aqueducts, started from the three main springs located at high points of the town.21 It was taken over, completed, repaired and sometimes partially abandoned. Throughout the history of the town, it has provided water for fountains, public baths, public buildings and large residences. The springs were part of the hydraulic industry, powering mills both upstream and downstream of the town.22 It is an invisible network, still active, which could not fail to participate in the structuring of the visible town.

10Flavia Neapolis was surrounded by a rampart, the course of which is only approximately known. Nevertheless, the sources agree23 that it defined a town extending from east to west over a length of about 1500 m from the spring of ʿAyn Dafnâ in the east to approximately the western limit of the present old town.24 The maximum width of the town would have been 700 m in the west, assuming the integration of the Râs al‑ʿAyn spring. It would have narrowed towards the east to a minimum width of about 250 m and would have covered an area of about 68 ha, according to the maximum hypothesis.

11The Madaba mosaic, whatever the scholarly interpretation, confirms the orthogonal grid of the plan and the town wall.25 However, while the Roman plan is becoming clearer and the structural links with Mabarta are becoming clearer, our knowledge remains incomplete regarding the occupation of the land within the enclosure. Nevertheless, some important archaeological finds should be mentioned.26 The theatre [1], the hippodrome and the amphitheatre were built in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, after the town had acquired the status of a colony. The theatre is visible in the south of the town. It has a diameter of 110 m and would have seated about 6000 to 7000 spectators. The hippodrome, requiring a vast flat area, was built outside the western rampart in the 2nd century. It was 76 m wide and 330 m long and could accommodate 20,000 to 25,000 spectators. The amphitheatre was built later together with the circus. The building is 76 m wide (width of the hippodrome) and 95 m long on its main axis (axis of the hippodrome). It was built at the end of the 3rd century.

12The remains of a Roman villa mosaic, discovered a few dozen metres west of Martyrs’ Square, are some of the scant traces of dwellings in the Roman town. Nevertheless, they confirm the integration in the chequerboard network of a residential sector to the north of the street of Khan al‑Tujjâr, the present-day souk.

Geometry of the plan and meshing

13If the historical information, mentioned above, is transferred to the axis of the roads of the present-day town plan, an orthogonal grid, mainly oriented NW–SE, covering the whole of the old town, becomes apparent. The imprint of the Roman town emerges in this diagram (fig. 2). It pragmatically reconstructs the commonly accepted archaeological map.27 Two grids stand out in a rotation of the N–NE grid of about 10°; presumably to fit the site or because there were two stages of development.

Figure 2 – Geometry of the Roman routes identified on the current town plan.

14A few features of the grid are of particular note. The first is the duplication of the eastern entrance to the town at the level of the Great Mosque.28 Two urban figures, a fork and a bend, accompany the change of orientation of the grid (fig. 2, 2). These are recognised figures in Roman town plans.29 On the north side of the fork, after a 10° WNW bend, the main street continues along a straight path along which the main souk is laid out. On the south side, the road turns WSW by 10° as well. It forms a 190 m long oblique ramp, climbing 3.5 m, before continuing its course parallel to the street of the souk (Khan al‑Tujjâr) to form the second major structure of the old town: al‑Nasr Street (fig. 2, 3). The wall of the Qibla of the Great Mosque (al‑Jâmiʿ al‑Kabîr) is supported by the ramp.

15The second feature is the partial erasure of certain outlines. Thus, the decumanus, which is found to the east of the Zafir al‑Masri School, seems to disappear to the west. The street of the Souk al‑Basal (fig. 2, 4) (Onion Souk) partially disappears in small block to the north of the mosque of al-Satun (16th century). It reappears to the south of the mosque (fig. 2, 5) and then resumes its initial direction towards the hammam al‑Sumara (of the Samaritans) [22]. Beyond this, plot boundaries reveal traces of the line leading towards the valley in which the Râs al‑ʿAyn spring arises (fig. 2, 6). This erasure is also found to the east of the al‑Habâla quarter, where the second street (currently Shaykh Musallam Street) (fig. 2, 7) seems to be part of both grid systems. It is the only street that does so. The first section of the street follows a line perpendicular to the decumanus up as far as the very old hammam al‑Khalîlî. Beyond that, the street bends along a path aligned with the second grid. However, if one ignores the current layout for a moment and extends the initial axis virtually to the north of the district, it passes precisely along the axis of the impasse giving access to the recently rehabilitated hosh al-Bishr (fig. 2, 8). The theoretical block thus redesigned finds a logical place on the first grid. Is this simply coincidence or vestiges of the origins of the settlement?

16Two independent features of the ancient fabric stand out. They unfold around two streets in the upper part of the town, spaced 300 m apart. Both are aligned strictly north-south. Smaller streets intersect them, either perpendicularly in the case of al‑Qâryoun Street to the east, or parallel to the Roman grid in the case of al‑Satun Mosque Street to the west. They then connect to the orthogonal grid by delineating irregular trapezoidal blocks. Despite the similarity of direction and layouts, there are notable differences in the arrangement of the plots. The first figure has the present-day al-Qâryoun Street as its backbone (fig. 2, 9). Its branches seem to organise an extensive group of plots at an angle to the perpendicular grid system. This is the only large-scale change in the plot grid. The other street, further west, joining al-Satun Mosque to al-Nasr Street, seems to cut through an already existing urban fabric by imparting its oblique direction to only a few groups of plots bordering the road, like an urbanisation layout or a cut-through (fig. 2, 10). The building known as the Crusader Tower is located at one of the intersections of the road in the perpendicular grid, indicating that it predates the street that runs obliquely (fig. 2, 11).

17A few geometric observations facilitate comparisons with other towns. In the central sector, the blocks, with the exception of those at the eastern and western ends of the Great Mosque and the Khan al‑Wakâla respectively, are approximately square in shape and measure about 64 m × 62 m. In the northern sector (al‑Habâla), the width of the blocks is close to 61 m, while their length varies from 75 m to 215 m. The longest are often subdivided into smaller blocks. The varying sizes of the blocks characterises the southern sector. Variations in measurement from 25 m to about 150 m are not very significant. However, some elements of comparison can be noted. Several streets extend the orthogonal division of the lower part. The blocks maintain an approximate width of 62 m to 66 m. Moreover, the distance between al-Nasr Street and the Street of the Soapmakers, which runs parallel to it to the south, is about 128 m to 134 m, i.e. twice the width of the square blocks in the centre. Around the Zafir al‑Masri school, despite the weakening of the grid, the ‘ghost’ blocks, which are approximately square, have larger dimensions than the central strip, around 72 m on each side most of the time, but of up to 102 m in front of the Great Mosque for example.

18By comparison, in Jerusalem (Aelia Capitolina), the series of blocks inherited from the Roman layout, between cardo maximus (street of the souk Khan al‑Zayt) and the Haram wall, measure 65 m to 70 m wide and 100 m to 180 m long. This configuration is very similar to the blocks of the al‑Habâla quarter in the north of the old town of Nablus. In Bethlehem, the main meshes on either side of Paul VI Street, which are not of Roman or Hellenistic origin and are in the shape of an elongated crescent, measure between 62 m and 68 m wide and are intersected every 90 m to 100 m. Any comparison with Hebron, which has no Roman heritage, is much more uncertain because of the oblong shape of the latter’s meshes and ‘sub-meshes’.30

Illustration 2 – Mausoleum of Shaykh Badran, al-Nasr Street.

From structure to urban form

19Almost two thousand years after its foundation, the stamp of Flavia Neapolis can still be seen today in the layout of the ancient town. However, with the exception of the Theatre and the remains of the Amphitheatre, both located on the outskirts of the ancient town, no Roman building is now visible. This is not surprising, as in Damascus, Aleppo or Jerusalem, the permanence31 of the first Roman or even Hellenistic routes, corroborated by more or less thorough excavations, is evident, as it is in Nablus, in the orthogonal grid of the historic town. Of course, under the pressure of events,32 the lines have been erased in some places, deformed in others or hybridised with other street layouts. The ground has been raised, the width of the streets and the alignments have little to do with the ancient original streets. Each civilisation has deposited its layer of new buildings on the pre-existing ground plan. The coherence of the Roman urban project disappeared as new buildings were constructed, but the ancient plan became concrete as a new urban landscape appeared. This space contains within itself the accumulation of all periods of history but, apart from the architecture of the monuments, which retains its singularity, the oldest traces were swallowed up in the dynamics of transformation of the Ottoman period (1516-1917).

Illustration 3 – Literary café.

The Ottoman project

20During the long period of relative stability in Ottoman times, Nablus developed despite the geopolitical crises,33 profiting from its geographical position at the crossroads of regional and international trade flows. Its merchants exported three quarters of the soap made in the town to Cairo, by the Sinai desert road or by sea via Jaffa and Gaza;34 raw, dyed or woven cotton, ordinary fabrics, soap and olive oil were exported to Damascus by large caravans.35 From the ports on the Mediterranean coast, cotton was exported to the provinces of the empire or to Europe.36 Nablus also benefited from the annual passage of the pilgrimage caravan coming from Damascus, either by selling local handicrafts (leather wineskins, in competition with Hebron, for example), or by providing escort or defence services. This was an additional opportunity to strengthen its position in the regional trade networks.37 Demographic and urban transformations accompanied the economic growth. The town, which could accommodate more than 20,000 spectators on the stands of its hippodrome in the 2nd century, had a population of 5,000 to 7,000 inhabitants in the middle of the 16th century. It grew to 20,000 inhabitants in the second half of the 19th century, in area that was still contained within the Roman perimeter.38 The demographic growth continued in the 20th century, leading the population to settle beyond the perimeter of the old town from the end of the Ottoman period.

21Administratively, Nablus and its region formed a sandjak, a sub-division of a province, mostly dependent on Damascus but for a few brief periods attached to the province of Saida (Lebanon).39 The local power was based, in the first period, on the Mameluke system of division between rural sub-districts and the town. After the region was taken back by the Ottomans in the second half of the 17th century, Istanbul refocused power in the town by setting up local governors from the urban elites, under the authority of Damascus. By dint of alliances and marriages, a few great dynasties grew and competed for administrative power and its consequential economic benefits, while managing to preserve a relative autonomy from Damascus. They consecrated their accession to power by building palaces in the town that were emblematic of their position and of the uniqueness of Nablus.40 The palaces and the soap factories, the new khans, the courtyard houses of the great merchants and many ahwâsh, all contributed to the profound urban renewal of Nablus.

22This urban heritage can be studied using a corpus of documents consisting essentially of current land surveys carried out at the scale of individual plots, some historical data, old photographs and the 1937 Survey maps.

Suspended growth

23The Survey of 1937 gives an image of the town at a fixed point in time. Its perimeter and land use correspond, barring a few details only, to the aerial photographs taken by the British army in 1918. The plan of the old town is almost the same as it was at the end of the Ottoman period. This relative stability over twenty years is explained by the events that followed the period of urban modernisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The First World War, the end of the Ottoman regime and the beginning of the British mandate had already been very unfavourable to urban investments when the earthquake of 1927 precipitated the movement out of the old town.41 So, with the exception of some recent construction on gardens and the destruction mentioned earlier, the urban form of the old town was practically frozen at that time.

24From the end of the 19th century, modern suburbs were established in Nablus along the communication routes, around the gates of the old town, as happened in Hebron, Bethlehem and Jerusalem. However, while in the latter towns the new neighbourhoods simply extended the dense and continuous urban nuclei, in Nablus they produced a discontinuous town, appearing as interrupted developments, as if suspended in their momentum. The gardens that abound show this (fig. 3). They belong to three distinct categories. The first is that of fringe gardens bordering the built-up area at the foot of Mount Gerizim and occupying, to the north, the large flat area to the west of the al‑Habâla quarter (fig. 3, a). The second is made up of a group of gardens spreading randomly over the space between al‑Nasr Street and the Street of the Soapmakers (fig. 3, b). It is interrupted by a few densely built‑up sectors to the east around the ancient decumanus (present‑day Qaysariyya Street) and al-ʿAqaba Street, to the west around the street of the Souk al‑Basal, and by large buildings such as the Touqan Palace (18th century). Finally, the third category is a series of small gardens enclosed within the rectangular blocks of the al‑Habâla quarter (fig. 3, c).

Figure 3 – Gardens in the town: in 1930 (light green) and those remaining in 2018 (dark green).

25On the fringes of the town, when they meet the countryside, the gardens are enclosed by rural roads and blend into the agricultural landscape of market gardens, orchards and pastures, as seen in the polychrome photographs of the 1890s.42 On the town side, their boundaries are broken up by rectangular indents and projections following the outlines of plots, testifying to the progression of urban growth encroaching on cultivated land. On the 1937 map, gardens represent more than a quarter (32%) of the surface area of the old town, i.e. 9.5 ha out of 30 ha.43 However, given the four- or five-fold increase in the population since the 16th century and the increase in the built-up area that this implies, the garden town that was being created at the beginning of the 20th century is certainly only a pale reflection of the town in a garden44 so often evoked by travellers.45

Figure 4 – Route map.

26The urban structure which emerges as a negative image from the gardens shows a town with polymorphic growth, both hierarchical and multi‑centred, tree-like and linear. This complex structure is explained by contradictory growth dynamics. On the one hand, the commercial power of the souk acts as a centripetal force, sustainably attracting the urban centrality. On the other hand, the citadels of local power, faithful to the Ottoman tradition,46 settled away from the centre and, like centrifugal forces, pulled the urbanisation towards the peripheral districts of the town where, away from the congestion of the souks, many soap factories found available land and an ease of access that suited their business. These movements, guided, like water running down a thread, by the ground plan of the Roman routes, encountered local centres crystallised around facilities from an earlier period, and simply surrounded them, reinforcing the multipolar character of the town. The final phase of these dynamics of inverse tensions was played out in the period of modernisation that took place at the turn of the 19^th century. This time, however, local power was vested in the municipality which refocused its institutional representation, while expansion was directed to the suburbs. The complexity of the urban form born of these interactions is fairly well transcribed in the enumeration of twelve district place-names proposed by J.-A. Jaussen.47 They are more in line with the morphological divisions than the seven commonly accepted divisions.48 Nevertheless, it is by studying the composition and coherence of the different elements of the old town that the overall construction of the heritage complex can best be explained.

The central area

27The sector defined by the main streets crossing the town, the street of the Khan al‑Tujjâr and al‑Nasr Street (ill. 6), is the main centre of the town in view of the intensity of its commercial activity and the large mosques that are clustered there. Over the centuries, the latter have consolidated the Roman grid of this part of the town by stabilising the alignment of the streets and the corners of the blocks with their façades. Thus, from east to west, the Great Mosque, then the al-Nasr Mosque, buildings of Byzantine origin that were subsequently transformed, are followed by the al‑Bayk and al‑Hanbalî mosques [4, 5, 6, 7] rebuilt in 1745 and 1527 respectively.49 Each of them contributed to the structuring of a block. In the 16th century, the construction of the Khan al‑Tujjâr established the commercial character and centrality of the district in a definitive manner.

28The khan, created on the initiative of the provincial power of Lala Mustapha Pasha, governor of Damascus (1563–1568), was part of a global movement of investment in the commercial infrastructures of the region by pious foundations (waqfs) and Ottoman dignitaries. At that time, as part of a reorganisation of commercial flows, the governors of the province promoted large-scale projects for souks and khans in Damascus –the provincial capital– in Aleppo, in Sidon (Saida, Lebanon) –the port of Damascus– in Kuneitra in the Golan Heights and in Nablus.50 The Khan al‑Tujjâr is a true urban project, conceived and designed as a fragment whose architecture and geometry are perfectly mastered and imposed as a patch on the background of the pre-existing urban fabric.51 Being built in alignment with the street, it confirms the primacy of the street at the same time as enhancing the central stretch by its sophisticated architecture. The operation serves local businesses as much as it highlights the involvement of Ottoman power in urban embellishment and economic affairs. This kind of urban intervention could be compared to the construction of the royal squares erected in Paris under Henri IV (1589–1610),52 but in the Ottoman Empire of the 16th century, it is found in the large-scale architectural and urban projects carried out under the direction of Mimar Sinan,53 who implemented a new imperial aesthetic in the various provinces. From 1554, barely ten years before the Khan al‑Tujjâr was built, the great architect Sinan directed the construction of the Tekkiya Suleimaniyya in Damascus under the governorship of Samsi Ahmad Pasha (1554–1560), predecessor of Lala Mustapha Pasha.54 This monumental work could not fail to influence the architectural creations of the region, when they were not directed by the Sultan’s architect himself (fig. 5).

Figure 5 – Plan of the central sector, scale 1:1000.

29In the periods following the construction of the Khan al‑Tujjâr, large caravanserais, linked mainly to the cotton and fabric trade and to the commercial activities arising from the pilgrimage caravans to Mecca, clustered around the central axis, confirming the predominance of economic functions in the structuring of the central space.55 The Wakâla al‑Farrukhiyya56 (built in 1612, destroyed at the beginning of the 20th century) built behind the Khan al‑Tujjâr on the north side, and the Khan al‑Wakâla (erected in 1630,57 renovated in 1795,58 restored to use in 2018) [21] at the western entrance to the town, are the principal examples. These buildings, which have a large capacity to accommodate merchants, reinforce the urban framework of the sector.

Illustration 4 – Al-Nasr Street, west gate.

30In the last decades of the 19th century, Nablus experienced a time of urban reforms and social transformations. As in Jerusalem,59 the gateway to Jaffa, and in many other towns of the empire, central power, the municipality and economic forces joined together in a town-centre project that symbolised modernity and openness to new urban practices. This was to be al‑Manâra Square (or al‑Nasr Square) (ill. 7). A public square, a completely new type of space in the historic urban fabric. Of modest dimensions, barely 1000 m², it was to be located as close as possible to the Khan al‑Tujjâr. Its form is the result of the pragmatic association of three modern buildings with an old public facility –the New Khan [20], the seraglio (municipality building), the Clock Tower [3] and the old al‑Nasr mosque [5]– in a simple plan based on the orthogonality of the underlying outlines. The Clock Tower (1898–1900), built to honour the jubilee of Sultan Abdulhamid II, celebrates imperial power as much as it integrates Nablus into the time of the modern world.60 It was not the first building to be constructed but it is the flagship of the square. It focused attention and gave meaning to the juxtaposition of buildings; taller than any other building in the town, it became the symbol and the landmark of the new centre. The architecture is a combination of various styles. The superimposition of Ottoman motifs and a modern clock face for the Tower, the metal framework of the New Khan (1883) like that of the Hamidiyé Souk in Damascus,61 the tiled roof and large oriels opening towards the Tower for the seraglio62 (late 19th – early 20th century), formed an eclectic urban ensemble. A few years later, at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, municipal or imperial initiatives, serving the urban elite, would pull the pendulum of urban modernisation towards the suburbs, particularly in the west with the creation of the al‑Manshiyya garden (1911) and the Rashîdiyya school.63 Then came the war and a new period of history began, interrupting the equilibrium between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in favour of a definitive exit from the historic town.

Figure 6 – Souks: greengrocers (red), clothing and fabrics (yellow), furniture (grey), food shops, restaurants and cafés (orange), services (blue).

Figure 7 – Butcher’s shop, east of the Khan al-Tujjâr (monument 1, fig. 6), plan and cross-section, scale 1:125.

Figure 8 – Bakery (mark 2, fig. 6), scale 1:125.

Figure 9 – Bakery (marker 3, fig. 6), scale 1:125.

Figure 10 – Café in al-Nasr Street (monument 4, fig. 6), scale 1:125.

Figure 11 – Shoe shop (marker 5, fig. 6), scale 1:125.

Figure 12 – Group of shops facing the Great Mosque (marker 6, fig. 6), scale 1:200.

The commercial streets

31“The market extends from one gate to the other […]. The great Mosque is in the centre”.64 With these few words, al‑Muqaddasi, an Arab traveller in the 10th century, summed up the dialectic of commerce and large public buildings in the urban organisation of Nablus. The market took precedence and the large public buildings accompanied it. These were exceptional elements, but at the pedestrian level their ground-floor shops make them part of the visual continuity of the commercial district. The businesses, as in all towns in the Arab world, are organised by trade and according to the value of the products. The commercial sector can be seen as sequences: a central sector, two sectors at the entrance/exit of the town and, separately, the north–south street of the Souk al-Basal (fig. 6).

32The eastern entrance sector leads to the gate of the Great Mosque. It is a single street. Fruit and vegetables maintain the traditional food speciality of this section of the street, where farmers from the surrounding area used to sell the products of local market gardening. The street is relatively wide and traders selling from handcarts are fairly well spread out. Nevertheless, the shops remain on the fringes of the urban fabric, extending only along the street of the Court of Justice, on the eastern edge of the al‑Habâla district.

33The central and most intense sector begins at the fork of the Great Mosque of al-Salahî al‑Kabîr. There, the main street splits into two branches, to form Khan al‑Tujjâr Street and al‑Nasr Street. They encompass the series of square blocks mentioned above. Khan al‑Tujjâr Street, the most valued commercial space, is at the centre of the scheme. Fabrics imported from the Far East and trainers have replaced the brightest silks from Damascus and Aleppo, the abas (coats) from Baghdad and the printed calicos from Manchester.65 The stalls follow one another almost uninterruptedly along the great east-west roads and those that cross them at right angles. Trade is confined to these streets, with the notable exception of the street of the Souk al‑Basal described below. Although as a rule the ground floors are reserved for commercial or craft purposes, there are nuances to be observed. On Khan al‑Tujjâr Street, the displays outside the shop fronts, grouped together in souks of different periods, overflow widely onto the public space, narrowing the passage to the point that a handcart is enough to block the passage, as would have a camel in times gone by.66 Al‑Nasr Street is wider. Just as today, the merchandise here in years gone by was less prominent.67 There are a few brief series of souk alignments between al‑Nasr and al‑Bayk mosques, but all along the street the shops are often wider and deeper than previously because, historically, they were used more for artisanal than commercial purposes, and their doors are spaced a little apart from one another, allowing the built units to be seen more clearly.

34On the western side, the destinations of the two main roads diverge on either side of a large atypical rectangular block. Continuing on from the souk, the trade in fresh produce resumes at the crossroads of the street of the Souk al‑Basal, then the commercial activity becomes less and gives way to the tinsmiths and various craftsmen up as far as the Khan al‑Wakâla. There, at the gateway to the old town, the conversion of the great building seeks a contemporary reflection of the historical effervescence of the great khan that once welcomed travellers, traders, caravans and pack animals. On al‑Nasr Street, after the crossroads of the Souk al-Basal, the qantaras mark the gradual change of atmosphere and usage. The street becomes less commercial, more artisanal and residential, and even industrial with the presence of soap factories. The last qantara, which was once closed by a gate,68 marks the limit of the historic sedimentary town. Beyond this, the plots of land are larger. In the last section of the street, religious and school buildings, large residential and industrial units are all part of the modernisation of the Ottoman town, which, at the turn of the 19th century, developed in the western suburbs in particular (ill. 4).69

35The street of Souk al-Basal is the longest street inherited from the Romans, and runs perpendicular to the valley. It is a peculiar case.70 It appears to reproduce, in an orthogonal manner, the sequences of the main street. The fruit and vegetable trade is located at the entrance to the town, to the north, then come the services and restaurants in the central part of the street before the shops become more and more spaced out as the street continues, becoming of a more residential character before it ends on a cross street (Lulu Street), parallel to the two main streets. In this last section, the street of the Souk al-Basal serves a dense residential fabric of ahwâsh on either side of the road, including the big hosh al-ʿAtout, described below.

Illustration 5 – A café, al-Gharb district.

The urban fabric of the upper part

36The upper quarters of the town, south of al‑Nasr Street, do not have the structural clarity of the block systems in the centre of town or in the al-Habâla quarter, which is discussed below. Here, there is no single pattern, but rather the result of an unfinished process of development interrupted by the historical events mentioned above. The disparate elements of the urban fabric clearly show the discontinuous character of an urban development that grew according to opportunities and the availability of gardens. Two categories of urban fabric can be identified in this sector. On the one hand, to the east, three urban fragments underpinned by the ancient geometry are in close proximity to, but relatively independent of, each other. On the other hand, to the west, a complex development combines linear growth, secondary centres, clusters of housing and large areas of residential urban fabric.

Illustration 6 – Al-Nasr Street.

37Despite their small size, Jaussen identifies the three eastern fragments as separate quarters (hârat) with the following toponyms: al‑Qaysariyya, al‑Jawza and al‑ʿAqaba. They may have been closed off by gates, as evidenced by the remains of the stone sockets for the pivots on which the gates swung, visible in the upper part of al‑ʿAqaba Street beyond the last qantara. Their particular morphology distinguishes them one from the other. The first of the fragments is organised in the form of a cross, the main branch of which is on the line of the decumanus with the cross branch following a perpendicular street of the Roman mesh. The latter descends the natural slope in a succession of stairways punctuated by vaulted passages, creating an urban landscape comparable to that of al‑ʿAqaba Street described below, but on a smaller scale. The identity of the district is manifest in its functional and structural hierarchy. The al‑ʿUmarî Mosque [9]and the al‑Masri soap factory [34], stand on the main street, preserving significant remains of an older civil or religious building. The two branches of the cross each serve residential cul‑de‑sacs giving access into the interior of the urban fabric. The main road forms a fishbone structure unique to Nablus.71

38The second group is organised around a large central space (partly occupied by the al‑Masri school), onto which two streets that follow the lines of the ancient grid, including the decumanus, open out. Schematically, the two perpendicular roads virtually cut the district into four approximately equivalent areas, from each of which the central space has appropriated about a quarter. The sources known to us do not allow an explanation to be suggested for this arrangement. Nevertheless, it can be seen that the truncated meshes are accessed through the hollow angle by more or less branching tree systems. This distribution system, which is a sign of a long historical sedimentation, is not homogeneous. In the north-western quarter, the Hammam al‑Daraja (14th century [27]) is served by a dead end from al‑Nasr Street, facing the qibla wall of the Great Mosque. Around the central space are the tomb, the zâwiya (al-Khadr) and various large 19th-century buildings (the al‑Masri house, soap factories).

39The third set consists of a street, simple and straight, and its few and short perpendicular dead ends. This is the very beautiful al‑ʿAqaba Street: the ascent (ill. 10). It is a stairway street, running north-south, arising from the Roman layout and linking al-Nasr Street to the upper part of town, at the corner of the Roman amphitheatre. Sectioned in three parts by covered passages (qantaras) the street is densely built up. The low height of some of the entrances to the cul‑de‑sacs, as well as the large‑scale foundations, suggest a long‑running historical sedimentation.

Illustration 7 – View of Mount Gerizim from the town.

40The western part is a vast area extending from al-Nasr Street to the foothills of Mount Gerizim and the large cemeteries to the west of the town. It occupies approximately one third of the total area of the ancient town. Exceptional architectural elements structure the space by creating a series of centres that are as many landmarks, dictating the hierarchy and sequencing of a more ordinary fabric composed of ahwâsh, soap factories and craftsmen’s workshops. Demographic fluctuations, and the destruction caused by the earthquakes,72 contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which the town was rebuilt on itself. It is easy to imagine that, in periods of low population, an areolar urban fabric was gradually formed, leaving large areas of undeveloped space for gardens, which also provided the land reserves for later extensions. During the Ottoman period, these gardens were the scene of a protean growth, starting from a space that was already organised by the imprint of the Roman network and the deposits left by different historical periods (the al‑Qâryoun springs, the ancient mosques of al‑Satoun [13] and al-Khadra [12], a tower of Crusader origin, the Samaritan quarter, etc.). The gardens that still exist around the buildings are an expression of this mutation. The movements of growth led to a certain unification of the urban fabric, the process of which we can try to describe, although we cannot give a chronological reading.

41Schematically this western part seems to be the result of various spurts of growth developing over a long period of time. Three main east–west streets and two north–south streets form the main framework of the sector. Al‑Nasr Street and the Street of the Soapmakers continue their main role of linking the districts to each other and to the region. Between the two, a lane (Lulu Street),73 structural at a district level, starts from Touqan Palace, and seems to be a hinge between the block urbanism going up al‑Nasr Street and a multipolar urbanism coming from the district of Yasmîna (situation fig. 6), away from the centre. At right angles to these streets, running from east to west are the street of the Touqan Palace and then the street of the Souk al-Basal. The first street follows the orientation of the Roman routes, but its offsets and shifts seem to indicate a gradual fabrication linked to the construction of the large buildings in the area (see below). The second north-south street is the street of the Souk al‑Basal, which, as we have seen previously, has seen the erasure of part of its original layout, to the north of the al‑Satun mosque. The mix of functions in the sector (palaces, large residences, ahwâsh, soap factories), which is unusual in the towns of the Arab East, reflects the interactions between political and economic power. It is combined with the sedimentary and multipolar character of the urban growth of the sector. This dynamic can be better understood by looking at the formation of some of the centres and the ordinary urban fabric.

Exceptional items

42Al-Nasr Street is a linear centre. It favours commercial and craft activities and its built fabric is essentially limited, on the south side, to a first row of buildings traversed by different circulation systems. There are a scant few short dead ends providing access to a thin residential fabric or facilities such as the hammam al-Daraja [27] in the second row; systems of stairways leading from the street to a forecourt on the first floor that gives access into the ahwâsh or large residences such as the residence of al-Agha Touqan; and finally, the system of tree-like lanes of the hosh al-Jitân74 (fig. 33), which remains one of the rare examples of deep urbanisation leading directly off the main street. The continued existence of gardens confirms this limited urbanisation. The construction, at the end of the 19th century, of part of the seraglio on gardens, the remains of enclosed gardens at the back of the modern souk, or the large courtyard garden of the adjoining café, bear witness to the low density of the sector.

43An urban centre with Piranesian architecture was built to the south-west of the town around the al‑Satun mosque (late 14th century) [13], at the crossroads between the north–south street serving the mosque and the east–west street of the soap factories. In addition to the mosque, the crossroads includes a sabîl, the soap factory of the al‑Khammâsh family (late 18th century) [29] and the Husayn Abd al‑Hadi Palace (1834) [18]. It is a covered crossroads. The architectural form and, to some extent, the public use, could be compared to the system of long-span vaults housing large public mastabas in the heart of the al‑Sawâkina district of Hebron. But here the excessiveness of the architectural device supporting part of the Husayn Abd al‑Hadi palace unites an architectural and functional complexity specific to Nablus in the great strides of the stone arches. At the crossroads, the shadow cast by the large arches marks a pause in the linear progression of the paths. It detaches the residential districts from one another, while the structure forming an urban room unites them around a local centre. While the architectural solutions may have been tried and tested in the large qantaras or in the sequence of vaults bordering the al‑Nimr Palace [15], the monumental aspect of this construction refers back to the crossroads location and the complex geometry of the urban layout. The solution chosen by the builders to link the street that runs at an angle to the mosque placed in the geometry of the Roman grid, produces the form, unprecedented in the public space, of an enormous pillar detached from the façades that surround it. This composition creates a star‑shape of perspective views over the streets and creates a play of light and shadow that contributes to the expressionist drama of the site (ill. 8).

Illustration 8 – Qantara, Husayn Abd al-Hadi Palace.

44The palaces of Nablus, as we have seen above, play a very active role in the modelling of the town. The Touqan family palace (1795) provides a new example.75 As governors at the turn of the 18th century,76 the Touqans found a sufficiently large and available space in the garden area south of al‑Nasr Street to build their palace [16] (mid-18^th century), which was to be one of the largest buildings in Nablus. In the neighbouring block, the layout of the large Agha Touqan house provides further evidence of the permanence of gardens close to the central districts in the 18th and 19th centuries. Even today, after a cross-vaulted passageway, the Agha Touqan house is reached by a path whose rural appearance is reminiscent in every respect of the suburban gardens shown in the photochromes. It is a manifestation of the origins of a place that was to be characterised by the low density of the buildings.

45Beyond its perimeter, the Touqan Palace cannot fail to influence the alignment of the urban design. Al‑Bayk Touqan street that serves the palace follows geometry of the Roman plan. Although it is set back to face the al‑Bayk mosque (rebuilt by the same family a few decades earlier), in practice it extends a street that clearly belongs to the Roman grid and comes from the al-Khazindar gate, which today leads to the Martyrs’ Square. The street itself is built in two sections. The first section made it possible, through two pivot gates installed in the qantaras at either end, to isolate the main access to the palace from the central quarters via al-Nasr Street as well as from the countryside and the sectors of the Yasmîna quarter. Lulu Street, the hinge line mentioned earlier, originates after the last qantara to the south. It most probably follows the ancient traces, taking approximately the direction of the decumanus and then running along the base of a tower of crusader origin at one of its crossroads. It also serves the ancient al‑Satun mosque by means of a cross street, while its main direction has the attributes of an urbanisation street, with its alternating houses and soap factories. The second section of al-Bayk Touqan Street only connects to the first one after a sharp bend forming a chicane. The offset of the stables and the salamlik of the palace,77 which is either the cause or the consequence of the bend in the road, is to be noted, although the morphological analysis cannot explain the reasons for this. The continuation of the lane bordered by the great house of al-Nabulsi (1831 and 1901), built up against the Touqan Palace, and its outlet opposite the entrance to the Abd al‑Hadi Palace [17] can be linked, given the dates of construction of the buildings, to a later phase of growth.

46The Abd al-Rahim Abd al‑Hadi Palace (1855)78 contributed to the urban growth at the foot of Mount Gerizim, while at the same time the geometry of its layout links it directly to the previous urbanisation. The façade of the palace is part of the alignment of the southern side of the Street of the Soapmakers, and its lateral façade opened up a new street to urbanisation, in an area of gardens. It should be noted that this street extends the continuous route from the lower part of the town to the upper part, after a slight bend, comparable to that of the corner of the al‑Bayk mosque. This very large building plays on the Gerizim buttresses to enhance its size. This double play of architecture imposing itself in the urban vista while using the natural slope for the benefit of vast warehouses confirms, if it were necessary, how economy and politics complement each other for the great families of Nablus.79

Main streets and ordinary urban fabrics

47The street known as Street of the Soapmakers (fig. 4) appears in the southern part of the town as a line of growth. The edge of it has a mixed urban fabric, residential and industrial, relatively independent of the sectors through which it crosses, and combines disparate elements from different periods into a coherent whole. To explain: from the crossroads of the al‑Satun mosque, the street runs almost straight towards the east. A vaulted passage, once closed by a gate, marks the exit from the town. Beyond this, the street becomes a road on the 1937 map. It passes between some gardens before joining  the edge of the town at the foot of the ancient amphitheatre. The street also continues to the west, but after the crossroads mentioned above, its status changes. It becomes narrower, acting as a local service road providing residential access to the area of the former Samaritan synagogue but also  giving access to one of the gates of the Husayn  Abd al‑Hadi palace, through long covered alleys that branch off  at right angles. The street ends like a cul‑de‑sac, with only two long, low, narrow and vaulted paths, unsuitable for the passage of pack animals, one to the north and the other to the south.

48The toponym ‘Soapmakers’ comes from the central section of the street along which are multiple soap factories, with their large façades pierced by regular windows on the upper floor. However, the street is far from being strictly industrial or homogeneous in form. A number of houses, in the form of ahwâsh, established on small interlocking plots of land are interspersed between the factories, while the street widens in its central part to create al‑Tawtah Square. A true neighbourhood centre, it is perfectly delimited by the qantaras that mark in space the transition from the streets to the square. Urbanisation was not continuous on the British Survey map, nevertheless al‑Tawtah Square and the Street of the Soapmakers are the common outlet of access streets and residential dead-ends serving small clusters of ahwâsh. Of diverse origins, they meet at a tomb80 or are centred on the ancient source of al-Qâryoun, which gives rise to the eponymous square and the al-Tîna mosque [14] (1892) that together form a neighbourhood centre. These groupings have in common an urban fabric of small, essentially residential plots, and the design of their roads often diverges from the perpendicular lines of the main roads. The main street and the square gradually reunite these dispersed groups by networking them with each other and with the urban ensemble.

49To the south of the crossroads of the al‑Satun mosque, a small residential area grouped around a hammam (al‑Sumara, ‘of the Samaritans’) [22] and a tomb (Shaykh Masaad) repeats the pattern of residential clusters networking with the whole urban fabric through the mediation of a street. This street is an extension of the axis of the Souk al-Basal. The recurrence of this layout in the southern districts of the town, al-Yasmîna and al‑Qâryoun, on the margins of the Street of the Soapmakers, evokes a system of discontinuous growth comparable to that of a town composed of hamlets or villages that have been conjoined by the linear growth of the suburbs.

The large blocks of the al-Habâla district

Figure 13 – Plan of the al-Habâla district: to the north the al-Nimr palace and to the south the great mosque (al-Salahî al-Kabîr), scale 1:1000.

50The al‑Habâla quarter (fig. 6) is distinguished from the previous quarters by the regularity of its design and the homogeneity of its morphology (fig. 13). The Roman layout,81 which certainly prevailed for many centuries, dominates this roughly square‑shaped district, whose surface of about 5.5 ha is about 1/5 of the surface of the historic town. For many centuries, the organic town appropriated the ancient layout while differentiating the spaces. The district is clearly aligned north‑south, and its very active periphery is distinguished from its residential interior. The street of the souk, densely line with commercial premises, forms the southern limit; however, the spread of activities towards the interior of the district tends to be warehousing rather than commerce. A narrowing, a qantara or the chicane of the old hammam al-Khalîlî [28] mark the movement away from the souk. To the north, the railway embankment seems to have taken over, at the beginning of the 20th century, the place and the enclosing role of the old Roman rampart, or even of successive ramparts. The internal streets no longer come up against a massive stone wall, but rather come up against the difference in level, which persists despite the disappearance of the railway tracks. The street along the edge of this barrier forms a tension line between two very active commercial districts of the modern town and is filled with shops.

51The urbanisation of the district offers a new image of the historic town’s reconstruction on itself. It is neither of the radio-concentric type, manifested by a progressive extension of the built area, nor of the dispersed type, as in the Street of the Soapmakers. The urbanisation is characterised by the filling in, certainly according to urban opportunities, of a pre-existing structure (the Roman grid) consolidated at different periods by large public buildings: the hammam al‑Khalîlî, the al‑Masakîn Mosque [10] (originally a crusader hospital, partially destroyed),82 the al‑Nimr palace (1687), the al‑Anbîyâʾ Mosque (1762) [11]. The palace is the most outstanding exceptional feature. It is the first governor’s palace to be established in Nablus. It was built on the northern edge of the district, near the exits from the town, on a similar plan to that of its later southern counterpart, the Abd al‑Rahim Abd al‑Hadi Palace. It has its own garden.

52The district near the main routes (railway and regional roads) was very sensitive to the modernisation of the late Ottoman period. The urban fabric included many buildings with large façades that are accessed directly from the street. They can be recognised on the map by their rectangular and regular plots, sometimes grouped in subdivisions, and, in the town, by their composite façades. They were more numerous on the eastern and western streets where, in tune with urban modernisation, the ground floors were commercial premises. Nevertheless, throughout the district, they alternated with ahwâsh systems and a few soap factories. Gardens were still numerous around the palace and throughout the district, but scattered. Their proximity to the buildings of the Ottoman modernisation suggests that they had occupied larger plots before being used as land reserves and built on in the late 19th century.

Access: dead-end and tree systems

53As we have seen above, the roads at the top of the urban hierarchy form the main network. Nablus is no different from other towns of the region, where most of the domestic access is from within the blocks, where a network of dead ends, with an organic layout, is framed by the traces of the chequerboard grid. These fishbone and tree-shaped distribution systems,83 identified elsewhere, are only deployed in Nablus in relative autonomy in a few sectors of the upper town. Nevertheless, three main forms of distribution giving access into an urban fabric essentially composed of ahwâsh: straight dead-ends, dead-ends with bends and tree-like systems branching into dead-ends. The transition from one type of distribution to the other usually results in an increase in the number of dwellings being served and a change of typological family.84 The principles are shared throughout the region, but in addition to the buildings usually served by the dead-end systems, ahwâsh and hammams, in the case of Nablus, there are also large houses, soap factories and gardens. This variety of occupation of the blocks nuances the too-clear separation of residential and manufacturing functions that is generally attributed to Arab towns in the Ottoman period. Furthermore, the appearance of small squares in the most complex tree systems calls into question a particular use of open spaces in the usually private domain of the inner blocks.85 The hypothesis, outlined in Hebron, that Palestinian towns make a particular contribution to the typological inventory of urban spaces in the towns of the Arab East, is reinforced. The selection of urban fabrics and particular buildings presented in the following pages shed light on the materiality and great richness of the urban fabrics of Nablus.