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Muhammad Ali, born in Kavala in 1769, ruled Egypt as Ottoman governor from 1805 to 1848^2,3. He chose to bury his family in the Southern Cemetery beside the mausoleum of al-Imam al-Shafi'i, a site earlier dynasties had built up². The earliest record of building there is a lost Turkish inscription of 1223 AH (1808-1809), known from a letter in the national archives². When his son Tusun Pasha died of plague in 1816, after the Hijaz campaign, Muhammad Ali followed the remains on foot to the place set aside for the family, and Tusun was buried under a dome^2,3. Isma'il Pasha, who died in 1822, and Muhammad Ali’s wife Amina followed². Muhammad Ali himself (d. 1849) lies in his mosque at the Citadel^2,4.

The cemetery then grew without a plan: Ibrahim Pasha’s chamber and its neighbour went up between 1831 and 1838, and that of Abbas I by 1851². Visitors in the 1830s saw plain rooms with carpets, chandeliers and gilded marble tombs; the European-style decoration of the walls followed between 1845 and 1851². A Persian inscription of 1270 AH (1853-1854) credits his sons with completing Ibrahim’s chamber, after a wall had been opened to bring in his large tomb². Khedive Tawfiq added a chamber for his mother Shafaq Nur in 1883-1884, and King Faruq the entrance vestibule and outer wall². Burials continued until 1902, but later members of the dynasty were buried in al-Rifa'i Mosque or at Manshiyyat Nasir^2,5,7.

On al-Imam al-Layth Street, a projecting portal flanked by octagonal buttresses bears the words Madafin al-'a'ila al-malika, Cemetery of the Royal Family². A domed vestibule leads to an arcade roofed by small domes and open on both sides to the courtyard; its columns frame the dome of al-Imam al-Shafi'i on one side and the cemetery’s own domes on the other². Verses from Surat al-Ghashiya on the rewards of Paradise run around the drum of the entrance dome². A carved stone portal then opens into a rectangular hall with a marble dado and a painted wooden ceiling, which leads to Shafaq Nur’s chamber and, through a barrel vault, to the older domed chambers².

Kolkailah finds that the plan follows neither the Ottoman nor the Mamluk funerary types of Cairo: it grew room by room and serves only as an enclosed burial ground². Its decoration mixes local, Ottoman and European models, with Rococo reliefs on the marble tombs and acanthus scrolls moulded on the domes and arches; Flaubert, who saw it around 1850, called the tombs rococo and ‘Euro-oriental’². The inscriptions are in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, with no clear preference for either, and in Persian only on the foundation panel of Ibrahim Pasha’s chamber and a few lines of Tusun’s bronze maqsura; many tombs give their date in a verse chronogram². One inscription names Muhammad Raja'i as architect of Shafaq Nur’s chamber, and the Persian panel of 1270 AH is signed by Sanglakh Khurasani, whom Kolkailah counts among the greatest calligraphers of the Qajar era².

The cenotaphs crowd eight domed chambers, set wherever there was space, so that wives, children, officials and two servants lie among the princes². A stele at the head of the tomb usually carries a turban or fez for a man, or a vase or coronet for a woman, while carved or painted braids and loose hair mark a mother, a wife or an unmarried princess². Tusun’s chamber has a white marble dado with gilded arabesque niches, painted imitation marble, acanthus bands around eight stained-glass windows and a large bronze maqsura around his cenotaph; Isma'il’s chamber opposite has bare stone walls and a plain white dome². Shafaq Nur’s chamber has painted vertical bands and a dome painted in gold².