Hisham's Palace

Mosaic in the audience room of the bath house.

Hisham's Palace (Arabic: Khirbat al-Mafjar) is the archaeological remains of an Umayyad winter palace located five km north of Jericho in the West Bank.

Construction and layout

The palace was built on the northern outskirts of Jericho, then an imperial domain, in 743-744 CE by Al-Walid ibn Yazid during the caliphate of his predecessor Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik,^[1] who ruled the Umayyad empire from 723 until his death in 743. It was modelleed on a Roman bath house and was covered with exquisite colored mosaics and stucco.^[2]

The complex comprised a palace, a paved courtyard, a bath house, a mosque, a fountain courtyard, a 60-hectare enclosure containing plants, animals, mosaic and decoration of the highest standard.^[3] The palace itself was a large square building with a monumental entrance and rooms on two floors around a long porticoed courtyard.^[4][5]

A sophisticated system of underground pipes was constructed to provide hot water and portions of the system still exist. The bath house also served as an audience room and banqueting hall.^[6] The architecture of the bath's main hall and fountain contain many examples of late antique and classical secular building techniques not known elsewhere.^[4]

Recent excavations have uncovered workshops and storerooms, which may indicate that the palace was also an Umayyad town.^[7]

Mosaics

In the top right corner of the Bath, a small room that was reserved for the Prince lied. In this room a luscious mysterious mosaic panel stood. The main panel depicts a large tree and underneath it a lion attacking a deer (right side) and two deers peacefully grazing (left side). The panel's interpretations have varied with some claiming that the panel probably represents good and bad governance, while others wrote extensively to explain that the Lion is indeed the prince and the deers are his wives or Harem. The latter back their claim with the argument that the deers seem peaceful and un-intimidated by the lion's presence. Thousands of fragments of the mosaics are stored in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, but few where able to study them.^[4]

The stucco features depictions of semi-naked women and is unique in Islamic art.^[2]

Many of the details of the palace are known to historians as a result of the excavation and reconstruction of its layout by Robert Hamilton.^[8]

The luxurious decoration throughout the palace surpasses that known in late Roman equivalents, something that is often taken as evidence of the irreligious nature of the Umayyads.^[9]

The palace was destroyed in 747 by an earthquake.^[10]

Notes

References

• Barker, Graeme (1999). Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415064481
• Bowersock, Glen Warren, Brown, Peter and Grabar, Oleg (1999). Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674511735
• Bussagli, Marco (2005). Understanding Architecture. I. B. Tauris. ISBN 1845110897
• Hansen, Inge Lyse and Wickham, Chris (2000). The Long Eighth Century. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 9004117237
• Hollingsworth, Mary (2003). Art in World History. Giunti. ISBN 8809034740
• Holt, Peter Malcolm, Lambton, Ann Katherine Swynford and Lewis, Bernard (1999). The Cambridge History of Islam. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521291380
• Necipoğlu, Gülru (1997). Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 9004108726
• Petersen, Andrew (1996). Dictionary of Islamic Architecture. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415060842
• Turner, Tom (2004). Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC - 2000 AD. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0415317487

External links

• Khirbat al-Mafjar at ArchNet.

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