Foundouk

A combined inn and warehouse for travelling merchants, characteristic of the urban medinas and major caravan routes of the Maghreb. The foundouk is typically a two-storey enclosure with stables and storage at ground level around a central courtyard and lodging cells above. Foundouks supported the trans-Saharan and intra-Maghrebi caravan trade that underlay the prosperity of many of the oasis ksour in this archive — particularly Sijilmassa, Ouadane, Chinguetti, and the lower Drâa — and the term is preserved here for cross-reference even though the surviving rural corpus contains few standalone foundouk buildings.