Cairo Citadel Wells Recast Magra El-Oyoun as a Machine

On June 6, 2026, archaeologists showed two stone wells and four waterwheels at the foot of Cairo’s Citadel. The finds sit in Arab al-Yasar and belong to Magra El-Oyoun, the medieval aqueduct that once carried Nile water uphill to the fortress.

Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s minister of tourism and antiquities, called the work a “qualitative addition” to how the Citadel actually ran. The more awkward fact is simpler. The last lift of that water machine turned up in streets the state had already emptied, on a wall Cairo is now selling as a walkway.

Two Wells Sit at the Foot of the Citadel

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the team opened two large stone wells, about 10 metres and eight metres deep, each tied to wheels that raised water toward higher ground. Beside them lay the remains of four waterwheels and a web of stone channels that ran into the Citadel, as a direct extension of Magra El-Oyoun.

Mohamed Ibrahim, associate professor of Islamic archaeology at Ain Shams University and director of the mission, said the cut appears to identify, for the first time, the final stage of the aqueduct’s water system, a stretch that does not show up in surviving written sources. Digging continues inside both wells, in search of the lower storage tanks.

The yard around the wells was not a blank slope. It was a workplace for animals and men who kept the wheels turning.

THE LIFTING YARD AT ARAB AL-YASAR

• Animal tracks: Paths for the draught beasts that walked the saqiya circuits.
• Stables and fodder rooms: Shelter and feed stores built into the same complex.
• Watering basins: Stone troughs for the animals that powered the lift.
• Paved work floors: Stone surfaces laid for the daily running of the wheels.
• The saqiya tower: Masonry raised over a large underground cistern that is still mostly unopened.
• Qawadis: Ceramic pots of the kind that sat on waterwheels, recovered with Mamluk and Ottoman coins.

The joint mission is run by the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology, the Cairo research house better known as IFAO. Its own project page records three excavation seasons at Arab al-Yasar, with the first two in 2024 and 2025 co-directed by Ibrahim and Joachim Le Bomin, and the 2026 season co-directed by Ibrahim and Simon Connor of IFAO.

The Ground Opened Only After 2023 Relocations

None of this yard was available to a trowel while people still lived on it. IFAO’s mission note is plain about why the ground is open at all.

In 2023, as part of the development of areas surrounding of the Cairo citadel, several neighbourhoods around the wall have been relocated by the Egyptian government.

IFAO Citadel mission page, Walls of the Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi Citadel

The two cleared zones are named. South of the fortress, in Arab al-Yasar, the aqueduct is thought to end at a wheel tower listed as monument 369 and tied to Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun. North of it, in al-Hattaba, stand the Nizamiyya Khanqa and the Mosque of the Seven Sultans. IFAO says no excavation had ever been carried out there, and that once the districts became open ground the outer wall, the aqueduct outlet, and the older occupation layers could be studied for the first time.

That sequence is the hinge. The wells are not a stray gift of the 2026 season. They are what you get when a hill fortress’s service quarter is emptied for a development plan, then handed to a dig.

Saladin’s 90-Metre Well Was Not Enough

Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi ordered the Citadel on a spur of the Muqattam hills in 1176. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says his vizier, Baha al-Din Qaraqush, then sank a spiral well about 90 metres deep in the rock, known as Yusuf’s Well after Salah al-Din’s given name. Cattle turned a wheel on each of its two floors. Historians recorded that the water started sweet, then Qaraqush cut further into the mountain and a salt spring ruined it. Nile water had to come in by channel after that.

The ministry’s Citadel listing adds that the fortress became the official residence of Egypt’s rulers under Sultan al-Kamil in 1207 and stayed that way until the mid-19th century, when Khedive Ismail moved the court to Abdeen Palace. A hill seat that long needed more than a brackish shaft.

THE CITADEL’S WATER STAGES

Preliminary study, Ibrahim’s team said, puts parts of the newly opened waterworks in al-Nasir Muhammad’s reign. That is a working date, not a closed one. IFAO also flags later cuts at the top of the saqiya tower that may belong to the Ottoman period, or to the French occupation, when the tower seems to have been used as a defensive post.

How Magra El-Oyoun Lifted the Nile Uphill

Magra El-Oyoun raised Nile water at Fum al-Khalij, ran it east on a high stone channel, and delivered it to tanks at the Citadel, where further wheels pushed it into palaces, mosques, kitchens, and gardens. Museum With No Frontiers dates the standing monument from 1312 to 1508 and describes the 1312 intake tower with four waterwheels built for al-Nasir Muhammad on the river, feeding a canal on raised arches that met an earlier Ayyubid line.

Those four Nile wheels are not the four found in 2026. The river tower lifted water onto the channel. The Arab al-Yasar wheels sat at the other end, at the base of the slope, and lifted again. Cairo Governorate’s own landmark note still calls the whole run “the Seventh water wheels,” a nickname that never accounted for this last yard because the yard was under houses.

Simon Connor said the French-Egyptian team is recording the architecture with photogrammetry and building a digital file of every find around the Citadel. Pierre Tallet, director of IFAO, added a field school that trains Supreme Council inspectors in current dig and recording methods. The science is being written onto a monument most passers-by still treat as scenery.

The Aqueduct Wall Is Becoming a Walkway

Walk the cleaned stretch today and the first reading is still a city wall. People clock the arches as defence, then learn they carried water. That misread is not a tourist quirk. It is what you get when the lifting yards are buried and the channel is a long limestone screen beside a road.

Historic Cairo’s UNESCO listing, inscribed in 1979 across 523.66 hectares under criteria (i), (v) and (vi), already names that screen. The statement of outstanding universal value calls Sur Megra El-Ayoun the medieval aqueduct that linked the city to the Nile and made possible a web of canals, cisterns, hammams, and sabils. The 2026 wells are the missing pump at the uphill end of a structure the World Heritage file has been describing as a river link for years.

Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber has been converting the same wall into a lit tourist path while that pump was coming out of the ground.

FROM CLEARANCE TO PROMENADE

1. 2023: The government relocates neighbourhoods around the outer Citadel wall, including Arab al-Yasar and al-Hattaba, and turns the ground into an open area.
2. 2024: The Egyptian-French mission begins systematic excavation of the southern and northern outer enclosures.
3. March 22, 2026: The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says restorers have finished work on Saqiyat al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun, the 1312 waterwheel inside the Citadel, along with the Iwan of Oktay and the Mosque of Muhammad Pasha.
4. June 6, 2026: The mission announces the Arab al-Yasar wells, four waterwheels, and the al-Hattaba mosque remains.
5. August 16, 2026: Saber announces that the first phase of the aqueduct restoration is done, a one-kilometre walkway from Sayyeda Aisha Square to Al-Moqattam Hospital, with cleaned stone, opened arches, and new lighting.
6. September 11, 2026: Phase two starts on the Nile Corniche face of the wall, with stone treatment and work on the upper fabric, in coordination with the ministry and the National Organisation for Urban Harmony.

Saber has said the full job, 3 kilometres from Al-Moqattam Hospital to the Fom El-Khalig Bridge, is due to be finished by the end of 2026. The Information and Decision Support Center, using Central Bank of Egypt figures, put tourism receipts at $16.7 billion in fiscal year 2024/25, or 3.7 percent of GDP, with 19 million visitors in 2025. The government is aiming for 30 million visitors a year by 2030. Historic Cairo is being asked to carry more of that load than Giza, Luxor, and Aswan alone.

A promenade on a misread wall will photograph well. A promenade that can point to ox-paths, fodder rooms, and two wells at the Citadel’s toe tells a different kind of visit: this was a factory for drinking water, and the factory floor was a neighbourhood.

Al-Hattaba Held a Mosque and a Layered Cemetery

North of the Citadel, in al-Hattaba, Diaa Zahran, head of the Islamic, Coptic, and Jewish Antiquities Sector, said the same mission uncovered a Mamluk mosque. What survives includes the qibla iwan, the mihrab, parts of the south-western riwaq, and stretches of the original stone floor. A burial chamber sat with the mosque, and other tombs from later Islamic periods. One grave is thought to be early Islamic, which would push the slope’s use back before the Mamluk fortress city.

Finds from the northern ground included those ceramic qawadis, Mamluk and Ottoman coins, jewellery, metal seals, and fragments of weapons from the 18th and 19th centuries. The slope kept working after the sultans left.

IFAO also began recording the Nizamiyya Khanqa in 2026, a square building about 35 by 35 metres on the rocky spur, looking down on Bab al-Wazir and, several dozen metres below, the sabil of Shaykhu from 1354. Founded in 1357 by the Mamluk amir Nizam al-Din as a Sufi house, it later read as a takiyya, then as a cemetery around two limestone burial chambers. During the French occupation of 1798 to 1801 it was partly wrecked and reused as Fort Martinet. Reused stone in the fabric includes pieces that appear to come from Pharaonic sarcophagi.

Al-Hattaba is not a blank buffer around a ticketed castle. It is a stacked religious, funerary, and military site that the clearance of 2023 made visible in the same campaign that opened the wells.

The Channel Toward the Royal Stables Is Still Open

Ibrahim’s team also traced a stone channel running west from the saqiya zone, with a steady gradient that may lead toward the royal stables. Ain Shams University said that cut could force a fresh dating of buildings around the Citadel. IFAO’s write-up is more cautious still. It calls the Arab al-Yasar works the likely terminal installations of the aqueduct, then says the physical join into the fortress is a lost connection, and that the cistern under the tower remains largely unexcavated.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The lifting yard: Two stone wells, four waterwheels, channels, and the animal plant at Arab al-Yasar are in the ground and recorded.
• The mosque: Mamluk prayer architecture and a long burial sequence are documented at al-Hattaba.
• The condition of the dig: The 2023 relocations created the open area; three seasons have run since 2024.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The lower tanks: Cleaning inside the 10-metre and eight-metre wells has not yet reached the storage cisterns.
• The join into the fortress: IFAO still lists the connection between aqueduct and Citadel as lost.
• The date of the wheels: A tie to al-Nasir Muhammad is preliminary, and later Ottoman or French cuts sit on the same tower.

Future seasons, the IFAO page says, still have to follow that canal to its end, fix how it met the Citadel, and date the dump layers, some of which may even go back to Salah al-Din. The last lift is on the table. The last pipe is still in the hill.