The Great Mosque of Banten

The Great Mosque of Banten is the chief monument of the Sultanate of Banten, a wealthy Muslim kingdom that arose in the sixteenth century on the north-western shore of Java and grew, on the trade in pepper and the spices of the archipelago, into one of the great commercial ports and Muslim powers of the East Indies. The sultanate was founded in the wake of the work of the saints who had spread Islam through Java, by a line descended from them, and Banten became a flourishing capital, a cosmopolitan port-city drawing the shipping of the whole maritime world. Its Great Mosque, built about the middle of the sixteenth century, is a striking example of the distinctively Javanese form of Islamic architecture: it is roofed not by an Arab dome but by a tall pyramid of five diminishing tiers, one stacked above another and tapering to a peak, a form descended from the older sacred architecture of the island; and beside it rises an unusual tall white tower, broad and tapering somewhat in the manner of a lighthouse and quite unlike any minaret of the Arab lands, from which the call to prayer was given over the harbour, a tower in whose design Javanese, and reportedly European and Chinese, hands and forms were mingled. The mosque was the religious heart of a Muslim court and a great trading city that long resisted the Dutch as they came to seize the commerce of the islands. The Great Mosque of Banten survives as a monument of the Islamic civilisation of Java at its height. This scene depicts the mosque and its harbour-city. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.