The use of a local lime­stone shaped the con­struc­tion of the old town of Hebron/Al-Khalil dur­ing the Mam­luk peri­od between 1250 and 1517. The cen­tre of inter­est of the town was the site of Al-Ibrahi­­mi Mosque/The tomb of the Patri­archs whose build­ings are in a com­pound built in the 1st cen­tu­ry AD to pro­tect the tombs of the patri­arch Abraham/Ibrahim and his fam­i­ly. This place became a site of pil­grim­age for the three monothe­is­tic reli­gions: Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam. The town was sit­ed at the cross­roads of trade routes for car­a­vans trav­el­ling between south­ern Pales­tine, Sinai, East­ern Jor­dan and the north of the Ara­bi­an Penin­su­la. Although the sub­se­quent Ottoman Peri­od (1517–1917) her­ald­ed an exten­sion of the town to the sur­round­ing areas and brought numer­ous archi­tec­tur­al addi­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly the rais­ing of the roof lev­el of hous­es to pro­vide more upper sto­ries, the over­all Mam­luk mor­phol­o­gy of the town is seen to have per­sist­ed with its hier­ar­chy of areas, quar­ters based on eth­nic, reli­gious or pro­fes­sion­al group­ings, and hous­es with groups of rooms orga­nized accord­ing to a tree-shaped sys­tem.