The palace tower or citadel was built at the top of a hill. Historians such as Al-Hamdani, Mohammed Al-Qazwani and Dr. Adnan Tarsis dispute the height of the original palace. Given its grandeur, its height was exaggerated in historic accounts. Most claims are between six and ten storeys. In the early 9th century, it was reported to have been "seven storeys tall with the highest room being of polychrome marble, and its roof a single slab of green marble." Al-Hamdani writing in the tenth-century in the eighth book of his celebrated geography of the antiquities of the Yemen, Al-Iklīl () provides this description:
