The Desert Palace of Khirbat al-Mafjar

Khirbat al-Mafjar is one of the most splendid of the so-called desert palaces, the country estates and pleasure-retreats that the caliphs and princes of the Umayyad dynasty built across the steppes and valleys of greater Syria in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. It lies in the warm, sunken valley of the Jordan near the ancient town of Jericho, the lowest land on the face of the earth, and is usually attributed to the period of the caliph al-Walid II (rahimahu Allah), about the 740s, though it may never have been quite finished before it was wrecked by the great earthquake of 749. The complex included a palace, a mosque, an ornamental fountain and, above all, a great bath-hall, and it was decorated with an opulence that makes it one of the chief monuments of early Islamic art: its floors are paved with brilliant figured mosaics, among them the celebrated panel of a great fruiting tree beneath which a lion leaps upon grazing gazelles; its walls and arches were adorned with carved and painted stucco, including figures of men and beasts in the manner the Umayyad court had taken over from the older art of the region; and one of its halls held a magnificent carved stone rosette, a great star-shaped window of stone tracery that is among the masterpieces of Umayyad ornament. The palace is a vivid witness to the wealth, the worldly splendour and the cosmopolitan artistic tastes of the Umayyad elite at the height of the first Muslim empire, an art that freely absorbed the late-antique heritage of Syria. This scene depicts Khirbat al-Mafjar and its decoration. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the historic ornament is shown as the archaeological record, not as a devotional image.