The History.

Ajdabiya ( Roman Corniclanum)

Qasr il Muhassan a Fatimid palace
Qasr il Muhassan Profile
Qasr il Muhassan Zoom Out
Qasr il Muhassan

Qasr il Muhassan From Behind
Qasr il Muhassan
Qasr il Muhassan
Qasr il Muhassan, as it looked in the 19 century.based on the sketch made by:Jean Raymond Pasho, who visited Ajdabiya in 1824.

Qasr il Muhassan Profile
Qasr il Muhassan
Images by Youcef Marzooq Youcef
Prominent Fatimid city in Libya.
Ajdabiya's owed its importance to its position on the junction of two important routes, the coastal route from Tunisia to Egypt and the desert caravan route from the oases of Jalu and al-Ujlah.
Although the site was known in Roman times, it was during the Fatimid period that the city achieved its greatest development. Several remains of the Fatimid complex have been recovered including a rectangular mud-brick enclosure wall, the qasr or palace, and the mosque.
The palace is a rectangular stone built structure approximately 22 by 33 m with solid circular corner towers and semi-circular buttress towers. The palace has one entrance in the north wall leading into a courtyard enclosed by apartments. At the opposite end to the corner from the entrance there is a large T-shaped suite of rooms which probably functioned as the royal apartment. The royal apartments were once luxuriously decorated with stucco work.
The most important building at the site is the mosque located in the south-west corner of the complex. Extensive archaeological work on the mosque has defined a Fatimid and pre-Fatimid phase above an earlier Roman site, but only the Fatimid phase has been investigated in any detail.
In 912 the Fatimids sacked the town of Ajdabiya and destroyed the mosque building a new one on the site. The Fatimid mosque consists of a rectangular structure (47 by 31 m) built out of mud brick with corners, piers, jambs and other structurally important points built out of stone. There was one entrance in the north-west side opposite the mihrab and several other side entrances, all of which appear to have been plain in contrast to the monumental porches at Mahdiya and Cairo. Inside there is a large courtyard paved with flagstones and a water tank in the middle at the northern end of the mosque. The courtyard is surrounded by arcades and on the south-eastern side is the sanctuary. The latter has a wide central aisle running at right angles to the qibla wall where it meets a transept running parallel to the qibla wall; all the other aisles arc aligned at right angles to the qibla.
To the left of the main entrance is a large square block 4 m high which was the base of a minaret with an octagonal shaft. This is the earliest example of this type of minaret which was later developed into the characteristic Cairene minaret form. There are also traces of a staircase built into the wall which have been interpreted as the remains of a staircase minaret used before the erection of the later octagonal one.
Little remains of the mihrab apart from the foundations and some stucco fragments: however, nineteenth-century drawings depict it as a curved recessed niche with a horseshoe arch.


Sources:
Archnet
Janzour.com