Amulet Atlas

placesKhan el-Khaliliخان الخليلي

said khaan el-kha-LEE-lee

also: Khan al-Khalili · the Cairo bazaar

placeAncient EgyptArabia and the GulfEgyptconfidence mediumneeds checking

Cairo's bazaar quarter, in the medieval city between al-Muizz Street, al-Muski Street and the mosque and shrine of al-Hussein. Shops sit at ground level in the walls of old khans — multi-storey merchant inns built round a courtyard — with workshops above and behind them. Goldsmiths hold their own souq inside it, and it is the goldsmiths' lane that matters to this atlas: a charm in Cairo is usually something small, stamped or cast in metal, and bought where metal is sold.

cited

When

1382 to now still carried cited

PeriodBurji Mamluk to the present
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
NoteDated from the foundation of al-Khalili's khan during Barquq's first reign (1382-1389); the commercial quarter around it is older.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

The quarter is named after a stable-master. During Sultan Barquq's first reign, between 1382 and 1389, his amir akhur Jaharkas al-Khalili pulled down the Fatimid royal mausoleum that stood here — the Turbat az-Za'faraan, the Saffron Tomb — and put up a large khan in its place. He is reported to have thrown the bones of the Fatimid caliphs onto the rubbish hills east of the city. The khan took his name, then the whole district did.

Sultan al-Ghuri, the last effective Mamluk sultan, demolished al-Khalili's building and rebuilt it in 1511, laying out a souq with monumental stone gates. Two of those gates still stand on Sikkat al-Badistan. By the end of the Mamluk period there were 21 khans and wikalas here; by the end of the 18th century, some 39. El-Fishawy's coffeehouse, still in the lanes, was established in 1773.

The present trade is aimed at visitors and at Cairenes in different lanes. Shops sell souvenirs, antiques and jewellery; the goldsmiths' souq still serves locals; crafts workshops run in the courtyards and upper floors. The scholar Remke Kruk found books on magic and sorcery well represented in street stalls and bookshops across the Muslim world around 2005, from Marrakesh to Cairo to Yemen, alongside religious pamphlets condemning the practices those books describe — an argument conducted stall to stall, in print, in the same streets.

Inference — the pharaonic amulet shapes a visitor buys here — scarab, wedjat eye, ankh — are jewellery made now, not survivals. This atlas has read no source that surveys what the Khan's stalls actually stock, so the record stops at what the goldsmiths' souq and the workshops are documented to be.

The market has twice been attacked. A suicide bombing on 7 April 2005 killed 21 people; a second attack on 22 February 2009 killed a 17-year-old French visitor and injured 22 people.

cited

Now

Trading, and oriented to tourism in its best-known lanes, as of the most recent published account this project has read. No day is marked open or closed below: the district's hours are the individual shopkeepers' and nobody publishes them as a timetable.

inference

Where

El Mercado de las BrujasThe BarkhorMerkatoMonastirakiVia San Gregorio ArmenoFushimi Inari-taishaSensō-jiMercado de SonoraThe Marrakesh soukThamelMana Whenua, Te PapaMercado de Brujas de GamarraQuiapo ChurchInsa-dongTha Phrachan amulet marketAkodessawa fetish marketThe Grand BazaarRoom 1: Enlightenment, the British MuseumThe amulet and charm cases, Pitt Rivers MuseumThe Lovett charms at Wellcome CollectionThe Egyptian galleries, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sikkat al-Badistan, off al-Muizz Street, Cairo, Cairo Governorate · 30.0475, 31.2622 precision: street cited

the coordinate published in the English Wikipedia article Khan el-Khalili, read 2026-09-16

Opening days

Nobody has published days this project could read. That is not the same as closed.

What is on record about it

What this is near

traditionEgyptian amulet craftthe tradition whose shapes are cut in this city's gold four thousand years after the workshops that invented them closedcarriesScarabsold here now as jewellery; the excavated ones are a mile away in the Egyptian MuseumcarriesHamsathe hand sold across this trade's whole range, from Morocco to the GulfcarriesTa'wizthe written charm the bookstalls serve — Kruk found the handbooks and the pamphlets against them on the same streetstraditionIslamic talismanic craftthe tradition those handbooks belong to, argued over in print in this quarterpracticeBuying one in a marketthe practice, in a quarter purpose-built for it since the Mamluks taxed stalls into stone shopsparallelThe Grand Bazaarthe Ottoman answer to the same problem — how to roof a city's trade and lock it at nightparallelThe Marrakesh soukthe other end of Kruk's line, where the same books are sold

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

placeCoptic cross tattoothe Cairo market a visitor is likelier to meet Coptic crosses in, sold as silver rather than worn under the skinplaceHamsathe Cairo market where it outsells every other charm against the eyeplaceQur'an pendantthe Cairo market where the cases are soldplaceTa'wizone of the markets that sells them by the trayplaceBuying one in a marketwhere this record's earliest date comes from: a quarter of stone shops built partly so the trade could be counted and taxedparallelThe Grand Bazaarthe Mamluk quarter al-Ghuri rebuilt in 1511, possibly in imitation of complexes like this oneparallelThe Marrakesh soukthe other end of Kruk's line, Cairo to Marrakesh, selling the same booksplaceThe market stall signa bazaar zoned by trade, where the district's layout still tells a buyer where to walk

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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