National Jewellery Museum (Morocco)

The southern part of the Kasbah of the Udayas, one of the oldest historical neighbourhoods of Rabat, includes a former pavilion or palace residence built by Sultan Moulay Ismail (ruled 1672–1727) at the end of the 17th century.

In 1915, during the French Protectorate over Morocco, the building was converted into a museum on the initiative of Prosper Ricard, director of the Service des Arts Indigènes under Resident-General Hubert Lyautey.

[5] Starting with the oldest known pieces of artefacts made by hominin precursors of modern humans, dated to about 142,000 years, the museum presents a reproduction of perforated shell beads.

A special section of the museum presents hundreds of pieces donated by King Mohammed VI from the royal collection of Amazigh (Berber) jewellery, including a large variety of silver fibula brooches and palm-shaped khmissa amulets.

For the less wealthy families, the negagefs [sic], women specialized in this kind of trade, rented their services for the duration of the wedding ceremonies, along with sumptuous clothes and especially the enormous quantity of jewels deemed essential for the bride to appear with honour and adorned like an idol before her friends, assembled in admiring curiosity.Since Besancenot's seminal work[16] about costumes and jewellery in Morocco, further studies and exhibition catalogues discussing the different types and their regional origins have been published mainly in France, including Rabaté (1999 and 2015).