page_title: Sebil (fountain)
section_title: Sabils in Mamluk Cairo
hierarchical_section_title: Sebil (fountain) / History / Sabils in Mamluk Cairo
caption_attribution_description: English: Sabil-kuttab of Sultan Qaytbay (1479), street view.
context_page_description: A sebil or sabil is a small kiosk in the Islamic architectural tradition where water is freely dispensed to members of the public by an attendant behind a grilled window. The term is sometimes also used to refer to simple unmanned fountains with a tap for drinking water, though other names often exist for such fountains.
  Historically, sebils are structures of both civic and religious importance in Muslim cities, most prominently in the cities of the Ottoman Empire, based in Istanbul, and of the Mamluk Empire, based in Cairo. They were built at crossroads, in the middle of city squares, and on the outside of mosques and other religious complexes to provide drinking water for travelers and to assist ritual purification before prayer.
context_section_description: The oldest sabil for which we have a date is in Damascus, Syria, and is dated to 1077-78 CE (570 AH) according to its inscription, which is well before Ayyubid or Mamluk rule in Egypt and Syria. The earliest (surviving) sabil in Cairo is the one installed by the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad at the corner of his father's monumental hospital-madrasa-mausoleum complex during restorations in 1325-26. As Mamluk architecture developed, sabils became a standard feature of the religious and funerary complexes built by the Mamluk elites and also came to be typically accompanied by a kuttab (a space offering primary education, especially reading of the Qur'an). These "sabil-kuttab" structures were often located at the corner of the building complex along a busy road or at an intersection. The sabil was located at ground or street level (where it was accessible to passersby) while the kuttab was usually above it on the upper levels. Mamluk sabils had facades with large windows covered by heavy bronze grilles and their exteriors were well-decorated, typically with stone-carving along their surfaces and with multi-coloured marble panels above the windows. The interiors were also typically decorated with marble mosaics and with painted wooden ceilings, while the water from the cistern often trickled over an ornamental carved marble panel (known as a salsabil) before being collected by the sabil's attendant.
  During the Mamluk period, such structures were almost always integrated into a larger building, and were rarely ever built as separate or stand-alone structures. The earliest free-standing or independent sabil-kuttab was the one built by Sultan Qaytbay in 1479  (the Sabil-Kuttab of Qaytbay) along Saliba Street. It was only under Ottoman rule (from 1517 onward) that independent sabil-kuttabs became a common building type in Cairo, with notable examples like the Sabil-kuttab of Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda at Bayn al-Qasrayn. This was in part because the Ottoman governors and elites of this period had relatively limited resources and Cairo itself had become densely built-up, leaving little space to build more. As such, the small but multi-level "sabil-kuttab" structure became a cost-effective option for political elites to offer charitable services to the general population, which in turn helped them publicly display their piety.
caption: Sabil-Kuttab of Sultan Qaytbay in Cairo
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