Mud brick, built up in the Najdi style on hills above the Wadi Hanifa, and for ninety years the capital of a state. Mani’ Al-Muraydi founded Diriyah in 1446, Muhammad ibn Saud made his alliance with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab here in 1744, and from 1727 to 1818 this was the seat of the First Saudi State. Then Ibrahim Pasha arrived with an Ottoman-Egyptian army and besieged it for about six months. The city fell and was destroyed, at a cost the Egyptians put at 10,000 of their own men against 1,800 Saudi. What survived is the At-Turaif district, three quarters of ruined palaces and walls in the same earth they were cut from, which UNESCO listed in 2010. It is now an open-air museum on the northwestern edge of Riyadh, restored and open, and it is the founding site of the modern country rather than a curiosity.
Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia
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