YEMEN: The Oldest Skyscrapers on Earth Are Made of Mud | 4K Travel Documentary
In a desert canyon in eastern Yemen, five hundred towers rise from the earth — some eleven stories tall. They are not steel. They are not concrete. They are sun-dried mud, built seventeen centuries before the first skyscraper in Manhattan.
Shibam is the oldest skyscraper city on Earth. Its towers have stood since the third century, rebuilt after a catastrophic flood in 1532, and maintained by the same families who mix mud from the harvest fields into bricks every year. It is a closed system — the same earth that feeds the city becomes the material that houses it.
But Yemen is more than Shibam. It is the birthplace of coffee, the home of the Queen of Sheba, and the site of a dam that irrigated twenty-five thousand acres for a thousand years. It was called Arabia Felix — Happy Arabia — the wealthiest civilization on the Arabian Peninsula for two millennia. Today, it is also a country where twenty-two million people need humanitarian aid.
In this documentary, discover how the world's oldest skyscrapers were engineered from mud, why ninety percent of global coffee traces its genetics to Yemen, and what survives when the oldest civilization becomes the youngest nation.
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