'Ibb

Ibb stands on a spur of Jabal Badhan in the southern highlands of Yemen, overlooking a mountain valley that turns green with the rains. Terraced fields climb the surrounding slopes. The town occupies a route through the mountains between Aden and Sanaa, and travellers and pilgrims have long crossed the passes above its valley.

Ibb was described as a town as early as the tenth century, although later writers also called it a village or fortress. Under local dynasties from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, it acquired strong walls, an aqueduct, a public bath, mosques and schools. Its closely packed, multistoreyed houses, streets and defences were built of local grey stone, relieved by whitewashed domes. In the eighteenth century the Danish traveller Carsten Niebuhr estimated that the walled town contained some eight hundred houses. Shops, warehouses and inns lined the narrow streets leading from its gate toward the Great Mosque.