Caravanserai
[2][3][4] Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information, and people across the network of trade routes covering Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe, most notably the Silk Road.
[5][6] In the countryside, they were typically built at intervals equivalent to a day's journey along important roads, where they served as a kind of staging post.
Urban versions of caravanserais were historically common in cities throughout the Islamic world, where they could serve as inns, depots, and venues for conducting business.
[2] In addition to lodgings for people, they often included space to accommodate horses, camels, and other pack animals, as well as storage rooms for merchandise.
[citation needed] The term funduq (Arabic: فندق; sometimes spelled foundouk or fondouk from the French transliteration) is frequently used for historic inns around the Maghreb, particularly those in the cities.
[17][13][18]: 318 The Arabic word wikala (وكالة), sometimes spelled wakala or wekala, is a term used in Egypt for an urban caravanserai which housed merchants and their goods and served as a center for trade, storage, transactions and other commercial activity.
[2] The term okelle or okalle, the Italianized rendering of the Arabic word wikala, is used for a type of large urban buildings in 19th century Egypt, specifically in Alexandria.
Directed by Muhammad Ali, he designed and built a number of okelles delineating the Place des Consuls (the main square of Alexandria's European quarter), which served as consular mansions, a European-style hotel, and a stock exchange, among other functions.
One early antecedent has been found in the remains of an Urartian site from the 8th or 9th century BCE uncovered in western Iran, near the mountain pass between Urmia and Oshnavieh.
[2][3] Herodotus reports that they existed along the Achaemenid Empire's Royal Road, a 2,500-kilometre-long (1,600 mi) ancient highway that stretched from Sardis to Susa.
[3] He writes: "Now the true account of the road in question is the following: Royal stations exist along its whole length, and excellent caravanserais; and throughout, it traverses an inhabited tract, and is free from danger.
[2] Caravanserais were a common type of structure both in the rural countryside and in dense urban centers across the Middle East, North Africa, and Ottoman Europe.
[2] The oldest identified example of an Islamic caravanserai is a courtyard structure at Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, an Umayyad complex from the early 8th century located in the middle of the desert in present-day Syria.
[2] The commercial prosperity of the Levant during the late Middle Ages led to the proliferation of numerous caravanserais in the heart of major Syrian cities and of Cairo in Egypt.
He sends someone with the travellers to conduct them to the next post station and he brings back a certificate from the director of the funduq confirming that they have all arrived.
[34][33][39] Typically, a caravanserai was a building with a square or rectangular floor plan, with a single entrance wide enough to permit large or heavily laden beasts such as camels to enter.
[2] The rural caravanserais of Seljuk Anatolia could include, in addition to (or sometimes instead of) a courtyard, a roofed section consisting of a vaulted hall with side chambers.
[2] The urban caravanserais of the Levant, from the late Middle Ages onward, were of typical layout but built with local decoration such as ablaq masonry and carved stone details.
[42][32] This made the best use of limited space in a crowded city and provided the building with two sources of revenue that were managed through the waqf system.
[44] In Safavid Iran, caravanserais had a standard layout for the most part: a rectangular courtyard surrounded by a gallery of vaulted openings (iwans) and rooms on one or two levels.
[35] In the far west of the Islamic world, comprising present-day Morocco and Spain, urban caravanserais were multi-story buildings with a central courtyard.
