The Mosque of the Elephant () was a small mosque built in 1105 by the

vizier A vizier (; ; ) is a high-ranking political advisor or Minister (government), minister in the Near East. The Abbasids, Abbasid caliphs gave the title ''wazir'' to a minister formerly called ''katib'' (secretary), who was at first merely a help ...

, and de facto ruler of the

Fatimid Caliphate The Fatimid Caliphate (; ), also known as the Fatimid Empire, was a caliphate extant from the tenth to the twelfth centuries CE under the rule of the Fatimids, an Isma'ili Shi'a dynasty. Spanning a large area of North Africa and West Asia, i ...

al-Afdal Shahanshah Al-Afdal Shahanshah (; ; 1066 – 11 December 1121), born Abu al-Qasim Shahanshah bin Badr al-Jamali, was a vizier of the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt. According to a later biographical encyclopedia, he was surnamed al-Malik al-Afdal ("the excellen ...

, on the southern outskirts of

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

. The building, the only known mosque to have been built under al-Afdal's regency (1094–1021), was located south of

Fustat Fustat (), also Fostat, was the first capital of Egypt under Muslim rule, though it has been integrated into Cairo. It was built adjacent to what is now known as Old Cairo by the Rashidun Muslim general 'Amr ibn al-'As immediately after the Mus ...

(Old Cairo), on a hill above the so-called Lake of the Abyssinians (Birkat al-Habash). It was built at a cost of 6,000

gold dinar The gold dinar () is an Islamic medieval gold coin first issued in AH 77 (696–697 CE) by Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. The weight of the dinar is 1 mithqal (). The word ''dinar'' comes from the Latin word denarius, which was ...

s and inaugurated in April/May 1105. Its name derived from a row of seven domed tombs in the vicinity, which from the distance is supposed to have looked like armed warriors riding on an elephant. In 1119, work began to install a new observatory at the mosque, in order to revise the

astronomical tables In astronomy and celestial navigation, an ephemeris (; ; , ) is a book with tables that gives the trajectory of naturally occurring astronomical objects and artificial satellites in the sky, i.e., the apparent place, position (and possibly velo ...

() used at the time in Egypt, that were hopelessly out of date. The affair turned into a fiasco: costs skyrocketed, especially for the large, and difficult to cast, bronze rings used for observations. Even when the latter were successfully cast and installed on the roof of the mosque, it turned out that the Muqattam Hills actually blocked the view of the sun during sunrise; the whole apparatus had to be transported to a new site on the Muqattam itself. The mosque was already ruined by the 14th century, when the

Bedouin The Bedouin, Beduin, or Bedu ( ; , singular ) are pastorally nomadic Arab tribes who have historically inhabited the desert regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia (Iraq). The Bedouin originated in the Sy ...

are recorded as watering their camels in its

cistern A cistern (; , ; ) is a waterproof receptacle for holding liquids, usually water. Cisterns are often built to catch and store rainwater. To prevent leakage, the interior of the cistern is often lined with hydraulic plaster. Cisterns are disti ...

References

Sources

* {{coord missing, Egypt 12th-century establishments in the Fatimid Caliphate 12th-century mosques in Africa Demolished buildings and structures in Egypt Destroyed mosques Cairo under the Fatimid Caliphate Mosques in Cairo 1100s in the Fatimid Caliphate Former mosques in Egypt