The Agdal is an enormous estate, located south of Marrakesh, that has survived from the twelfth century to the present. Historically it was used for agricultural production and related functions, and included pleasure gardens, pools, mills, and seasonal residences. This study presents the results of a multi-year survey of the Agdal’s water bodies, its place within the regional hydraulic system of khaṭṭāras, cultivation practiced there throughout the centuries, and the internal organization of its land and more than forty buildings. This archaeological approach is joined with a study of manuscript and published sources to give a comprehensive history of the Agdal, one of the most important historic landscapes in the Islamic world.
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Larbi Mezzine,“Le droit coutumier,” inSplendeurs du Maroc,ed. Ivo Grammet and Min de Meersman (Tervuren, 1998), 69; Pablo Domínguez, Francisco Zorondo-Rodríguez, and Victoria Reyes-García, “Relationships between Religious Beliefs and Mountain Pasture Uses: A Case Study in the High Atlas Mountains of Marrakech, Morocco,”Human Ecology 38, no. 3 (2010): 351–62.
See Léandre Vaillat,“Les jardins de Marrakech,”La Revue Hebdomadaire,39e Anneé (Septembre 1930): 439–58, at 454. Translated into English for this article from the original French.
The Agdal is an enormous estate, located south of Marrakesh, that has survived from the twelfth century to the present. Historically it was used for agricultural production and related functions, and included pleasure gardens, pools, mills, and seasonal residences. This study presents the results of a multi-year survey of the Agdal’s water bodies, its place within the regional hydraulic system of khaṭṭāras, cultivation practiced there throughout the centuries, and the internal organization of its land and more than forty buildings. This archaeological approach is joined with a study of manuscript and published sources to give a comprehensive history of the Agdal, one of the most important historic landscapes in the Islamic world.
Title:
The Agdal of Marrakesh (Twelfth to Twentieth Centuries): An Agricultural Space for Caliphs and Sultans. Part 1: History
