We know countless secrets about Al-Andalus. We know how the great Aljama Mosque was built, what the grand library of Al Hakam was like, and the luxuries that surrounded the life of Abd al-Rahman III in his magnificent caliphal city of Medina Azahara. But how did ordinary people live in 10th-century Córdoba? What were their houses like? What did they cook? Where did they evacuate the wastewater? These questions have gradually been answered over the last few decades.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a turning point occurred in the understanding of domestic life in Al-Andalus. Córdoba expanded westward, planning the construction of hundreds of new homes. To the astonishment of archaeologists, an ocean of medieval urban foundations emerged from the ground—the largest Islamic suburb in Europe, as experts certified. Over eight years, under the direction of archaeologist Cristina Camacho, a team of specialists meticulously dissected this colossal stone treasure. Millions of artifacts were recorded while the urban layout of an area exceeding 80,000 square meters was carefully studied.

This immense historical cartography was soon after destroyed by construction machinery in a controversial decision that sparked angry protests from some specialists. But that is another matter. Many years later, Cristina Camacho and Rafael Valera published a revealing study on the extraordinary findings recovered from beneath the earth. It was the most comprehensive and detailed report on the domestic life of the Andalusian capital.

The book, entitled History and Archaeology of Life in Al Andalus, succeeded in reconstructing the daily pulse of the popular strata of the Umayyad Caliphate. And it offered surprising data on the residential structure of a common dwelling: what the kitchen was like, how the bedrooms were arranged, how the bathrooms were fitted out.

The first conclusion of the detailed examination of the site clashed head-on with the preconceived idea of the urban layout. The suburb was not a hive of narrow streets and passages typical of Arab medinas. On the contrary, it was a perfectly delineated road with wide avenues and orderly urban planning. Experts believe that all this planning was based on a conscientiously calculated global project. It was not, therefore, the chaotic and improvised aggregation of homes and businesses.

The houses ranged from 30 to 200 meters in size. In general, they had a central courtyard and a water well for family consumption. This model, of clear Roman heritage, still survives in hundreds of houses in the extensive historic center of Cordoba. The houses have been renovated over the centuries, but the architectural pattern remains in many cases.

The suburb also had an advanced sewage conduction system , which was generally evacuated to the streams or directly to the Guadalquivir River. The houses had latrines and many of them included regularly renovated cesspools. There was an abundance of cisterns to store rainwater.

A large hall articulated the dwellings, which were accessed through a vestibule. The kitchens were usually equipped with anafres and portable ceramic stoves for stewing. The excavations uncovered thousands of fragments of pots, pans, vessels and all kinds of domestic objects, many of which are kept in the Archaeological Museum of Cordoba. The alcoves were organized around the main hall. In the dormitories, wooden beds or wool cots were used for sleeping.

The researchers examined in detail the household goods, based on common ceramics and associated with productive activities related to cooking, water transport, storage of solids and room lighting. And they found that the most cared-for surfaces had to do with table and storage ceramics, evidencing a clear ornamental awareness in the most visible objects. The rougher surfaces were reserved for culinary tools for food preparation.

To paint the pottery they used pigments made from calcite, lead oxide and tin. The black coloration was obtained from manganese oxide while the red came from iron oxide. The use of glazing techniques, used by the Roman culture but of which there is no trace during the Visigothic period, was also very common. The Arabs imported them back to the Iberian Peninsula in a phenomenon of technological transfer from the Abbasid court.

The process of orientalization of Al Andalus intensified during the emirate of Abderraman II in the first third of the ninth century. Two characters were key in the cultural transmission that crossed the Mediterranean from the great Islamic centers of the Middle East. The first was Ziryab, a poet, gastronome and musician born in Mosul, who introduced to Al Andalus the refined fashions that had been macerated at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. All this new oriental style had an impact on the Cordovan elites, also in the domestic furnishings.

Ibn Firnas was another essential precursor. Chemist, inventor and humanist, he was a pioneer in the manufacture of Cordovan glass, whose production center in the Emirate period has been located at the site of Zumbacón, where more than a hundred furnaces have been detected. The models of glass and ceramic tableware copied from the East served as the basis for the later development of the green and manganese fashions that had their heyday in the Cordoba of the Caliphate. What began to seep into the wealthy layers of the Umayyad aristocracy ended up spreading over the years among the popular neighborhoods of the Andalusian capital. Ample proof of this has been accredited by the archaeologists among the hundreds of thousands of pieces registered in the macro project directed by Cristina Camacho.

The great western suburb stretched in the direction of Medina Azahara, the great palatine city founded by Abderraman III to display his enormous political and religious power after he was invested as caliph. The first caliph of the West. Until then all his Umayyad predecessors had adopted the lower rank of emirs. But Abderramán III made a qualitative leap in his political distinction in accordance with the strength of the great Andalusian civilization that was consolidating in the south of Europe.

The experts identified a sizeable neighborhood equipped with all the necessary services of a well-articulated community. Numerous mosques, souks and lodgings or funduq with central courtyards and attached commercial premises were located in the excavations. Public baths also abounded, whose functionality was not limited to hygienic requirements, but also played a social role of community connection.

Urban cemeteries appeared and burials were discovered in small pits covered by tiles, all of them arranged in the direction of Mecca, as stipulated by Islamic precepts. The exhaustive archaeological study also made it possible to certify the existence of a market inspector or almotacén, who was a public official dedicated to ensuring that weights and measures were fixed in accordance with state ordinances. All these types of findings demonstrated that the interest of the Islamic community or umma prevailed over legitimate individual rights.

The excavated area was around 80,000 square meters, but the actual area of the Poniente neighborhood was much larger than that. Specialists do not dare to give an exact figure. What they do confirm is that there are vestiges still lying dormant underground, which will probably never be recovered. Nor is it possible to quantify the number of inhabitants of the suburb. Generally, the dwellings were single-story and each family unit had between four and five people. There is a certain consensus in placing the population of Cordoba at 300,000 inhabitants, an exorbitant number in the context of the tenth century. Only Baghdad at that time had comparable urban concentrations. It should be remembered that Paris needed 500 years more to reach 225,000 residents.

The authors of the book have used 3D digital technology to reconstruct the millenary houses of the Poniente suburb and to reconstruct the urban layouts of that residential area of the 10th century, which overflowed the limits of the walled city. In a rare occurrence, research did not focus on deciphering the questions of caliphs, amirs, jurists, warriors or relevant events in history. On the contrary, they went down to the working classes to examine their ways of life, their living conditions and the way they planned their suburbs. Another way of looking at history through everyday reality.