Shibam

Shibam stands on a mound on the floor of the Wadi Hadhramaut, at a point where the valley narrows and where caravans carrying frankincense and myrrh north from the coast had to pass. The earliest written reference to the town comes from an inscription of the third century AD, and it became the capital of the ancient kingdom of Hadhramaut after the older capital at Shabwa was destroyed around the end of that century. Its site was chosen for defence and for flood: high enough to escape the water that periodically fills the wadi, tight enough to be walled.

The town as it stands now dates from 1533, when it was rebuilt on the same cramped mound. Because there was no room to spread, builders went upward, raising houses of five to eleven storeys in sun-dried mud brick on stone footings, with thicker walls at the base tapering as they rise and whitewashed lime plaster protecting the tops from rain. Around 500 tower houses stand inside the wall, and the technique, carried on by local craftsmen, has made Shibam one of the oldest and best examples of town planning built upward rather than outward; it is often called the oldest skyscraper city in the world.

Under the Kathiri sultans, who ruled the valley from Seiyun, Shibam remained a market and religious centre, and money sent home by Hadramis who had emigrated to India, East Africa and South-East Asia paid for building and repair. UNESCO inscribed the old walled city as a World Heritage Site in 1982. Flooding from a tropical storm in 2008 undermined foundations and brought buildings down, and in 2015 UNESCO listed the walled town, with the old city of Sana'a, as cultural heritage at risk; the years of war have made maintenance of the mud fabric harder.

The town's culture is bound up with its buildings. Mud brick has to be maintained constantly: walls are re-plastered, roofs resealed and the lime coating on the upper storeys renewed, and the skills to do it are handed down within families of builders and plasterers. A house neglected for a few seasons begins to dissolve, so care of the fabric is a shared obligation as much as a private one, and conservation projects have worked with local craftsmen rather than importing methods from outside.

Life inside a tower house is organised vertically. Storerooms and animal space sit at the bottom, reception rooms for male guests on the middle floors, family and women's rooms higher up, and flat roofs at the top for sleeping in hot weather, with bridges in some places linking neighbouring roofs. Social life is strongly divided between men's and women's gatherings, and afternoon qat sessions serve as the setting for both business and conversation, as across Yemen.

Hadrami identity is outward-looking despite the isolation of the valley. Generations of emigration to Hyderabad, Java, Singapore and East Africa left families with relatives abroad, and returning merchants brought money, tastes and architectural detail home with them. Religious learning has great prestige, with the schools of nearby Tarim drawing students from across the Indian Ocean world, and poetry, sung verse and the chanting of religious texts are part of ordinary occasions.

Shibam is small: about 7,000 people live in the town, some of them inside the walls and the rest in the modern settlement of Sahil Shibam across the wadi and in the villages along the valley. Many families who could afford it moved out of the old town into newer houses with easier services, so the walled town has lost population, and keeping it inhabited is treated as part of keeping it standing.

The economy is farming and trade. Date palms and irrigated plots on the wadi floor produce dates, fodder and vegetables; goats are kept; and money sent home from the Gulf and from the older diaspora remains important. Seiyun, 18 kilometres east, is where the valley's offices, hospital and larger market are, so the road between the towns carries steady traffic. Building and plastering work provides a living for a number of households.

The war has not been fought in the valley on the scale seen in western Yemen, but the crisis reaches it: fuel is expensive and irregular, electricity is supplied for part of the day, public salaries have lost much of their value and prices rise with the rial's fall. Water comes from wells in the wadi, and flash floods after storms are both the danger and the source of the groundwater. The day starts early and stops through the worst of the afternoon heat, resuming towards evening when the lanes inside the walls fill again.

The food of the Hadhramaut valley is built on rice, meat cooked slowly in earth ovens, dates and bread. Mandi is the dish the region is known for: meat, usually goat or chicken, hung above rice in a sealed pit or tannur oven so that the fat and smoke run down into the grain, and served on a shared platter. Haneeth is its drier cousin, lamb rubbed with spice and roasted in the same kind of oven until it pulls apart. Both appear at weddings, feast days and any occasion with guests.

Bread is baked against the inside wall of a clay oven and eaten with everything: with fish or meat stews, with beans and eggs in the morning, or torn into hot broth. Sahawiq, the fresh sauce of chilli, coriander, garlic and tomato, is on every table. Everyday cooking uses lentils, okra, tomatoes and onions from the wadi plots, with meat kept for occasions, and dates are eaten daily and pressed into cakes for storage.

Honey is the valley's prestige product, above all sidr honey from the side valleys such as Wadi Dawan, produced from the flowers of the jujube tree and prized far beyond Yemen. Coffee grown in Yemen is drunk both as beans and as qishr, an infusion of the dried husks, and sweet black tea is poured all day. Sweets are simple: bint al-sahn, a layered bread eaten with honey and clarified butter, and slabs of halwa.