A Look Back at the Irrigated Areas of the Medieval Town of Tāmdult (Morocco)

From the 9th century onwards, Tāmdult was one of the three major caravan ports in the Western Maghreb, alongside Sijilmāssa and Nūl Lamṭa. By the mid-20th century, the remains of dwellings, metallurgical production sites and fortifications had been located a few kilometres south of the present-day oasis of Aqqa, which is irrigated by the resurgence of the wadi of the same name. In 1999, our research, which was based on field surveys and aerial photographs, revealed exceptionally well-preserved traces of a large-scale agricultural system and an irrigation canal network adjacent to the ruins. This completed the picture of this pre-Saharan oasis. An initial study was published in 2011. However, the question of the chronological relationship between the two oases, Tāmdult and Aqqa, remained unresolved. Processing recent satellite images (Airbus © 2023) of these two oases and creating a WebGIS interface now enables us to refine and correct our observations from 1999. This new data largely confirms our initial proposals, such as the joint development of an urban settlement and an agricultural area with an irrigation network. Furthermore, these new images show the branching structure of the various water distribution channels, the regularity of the agricultural land parcels and the existence of interstitial rural settlements. They thus reveal a hierarchy in this distribution that was perhaps insufficiently explored in our initial publication. Given the limited historical sources available, we can now make more informed arguments regarding the possibility of the two oases coexisting over time. We can also propose initial hypotheses about the main reasons for the abandonment of one of the oases and discuss the identity of their founders, which could be local tribal groups and/or branches of the Idrisid dynasty. The central issue of the dossier to which our contribution is addressed—‘The Role of Urban Elites in the Construction of Rural Landscape’—is adapted here to the specific characteristics of the pre-Saharan context in terms of both climate and settlement structure.