TITLE:
Explanation of the Damage to the Royal Family’s Cemetery in Historic Cairo and Examination of the Building Materials
AUTHORS:
Ahmed Elyamani, Nabil A. Abd El-Tawab Bader, Mahmoud Algohary, Ragab Abou El Hassan
KEYWORDS:
Historic Cairo, Cemetery, Differential Settlement, Groundwater, Damage, XRD, SEM-EDX, Examination
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Civil Engineering,
Vol.11 No.1,
February
25,
2021
ABSTRACT: The cemetery of the royal family, who ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1952, is
one of the masterpieces of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Historic Cairo. It
is a complex building from massive stone masonry walls supporting hemispherical domes and is
very rich with the marble decorative elements. Unfortunately, it suffers
nowadays from serious cracking due to on-going structural damage. Almost all the structural elements are
cracked. Besides, the continuous rise in the groundwater table affects
both its structural stability and aesthetics. A detailed inspection was carried
out to identify and explain all the manifested damage by the structural
elements of the cemetery. The differential settlement damage was found to be
very noticeable in the form of many diagonal cracks that are active and
threaten the overall stability of the cemetery. The construction history was
investigated and found to have a clear effect on the noticed damage. Examination
of the construction materials and deterioration products was carried out by
inspecting representative samples of the stone, the marble, the mortar, the
plaster and the salt. They were examined using different analysis techniques
including the Polarized Microscope, the Stereo Microscope, the X-Ray
Diffraction (XRD), and the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) provided with
Energy-Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) unit. This examination helped in
identifying the type of the used stone, the mortar components, the types of
salts affecting the structure, and the deterioration manifested by the marble.
It seems that the cemetery needs an urgent conservation project to stop the
deterioration and keep it safe for the next generations.