"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [ظ‎‎٤‎٠‎٢] (٨٦٢/٨٠٧)

636 TEN HISTORICAL SITES
in winter, is the most immediately impressive ruin in Iraq. It is apparently
a fortified palace rather than a fortress and may have been built either by
one of the pre-Moslem Lakhmid princes of Hira (p. 237) or, as is now
thought more probable, by a Moslem potentate in the Omayyad or early
Abbasid period, possibly Isa ibn Musa, a nephew of the Caliph Mansur.
Its style includes Byzantine and Sassanid elements, but a prayer niche or
mihrab oriented towards Mecca in a room apparently used as a mosque
indicates a date after the Moslem conquest. The building consists of a
palace-complex in an enclosure 175 yards square protected by a buttressed
wall with three gates. The north gate leads through a vestibule into a
central courtyard, and facing the entrance there is an open-fronted liwan
hall and other reception rooms. Around the courtyard and the liwan there
are sets of apartments grouped round smaller courtyards. A staircase led
up on one side of the courtyard to second and third stories. The mosque
is on the right-hand side of the entrance, and offices on the left.
Samarra (photos. 10, 12, 120, 121, 123, 210)
The ruins of Samarra consist of the palaces, mosques, and civil town
built by eight caliphs during the secession from Baghdad between a.d. 836
and 892, after which the town gradually became uninhabited save for the
small settlement around the Shia shrine of modern Samarra (p. 550).
Surfacing material was brought from the quarries and masons’ yards of
Syria, and even the Christian churches of Egypt were despoiled of columns,
pavements, and ornaments for the decoration of the new capital. The town
was built on the plateau escarpment above the Tigris valley, and irriga
tion canals and waterwheels created gardens out of a wilderness. The
earliest buildings are the Friday Mosque, a few hundred yards from the
walls of modern Samarra, and the palace of Mutasim, Bait al Khalifa.
The Friday Mosque, of which the walls still stand, was of simple design,
a great rectangular courtyard with three rows of pillars on each side and
nine rows at the south end. Its minaret, the round Malwiya tower en
circled by a spiral staircase, stood on a square base and was topped by a
roof supported on eight columns, a miniature imitation of the Babylonian
ziggurats.
Bait al Khalifa, the palace of Mutasim, is a huge complex of buildings
alined along a central west-east axis. The entrance was the triple portico
still standing on a terrace at the edge of the escarpment above the Tigris,
and approached from below by a stairway. A long open courtyard led past
the Caliph s apartments on the north and the harem on the south (connected
by an underground passage) to the central hall or courtyard, off which the
throne room opened on the north. In the centre of this court was a huge
basin hewn from a single block of pink granite, now in the Arab Museum
at Baghdad. Beyond a third open court or parade ground was the under
ground summer palace built as a vast sirdab. East of this again were the
stables for the caliph s stud, the long polo ground and the grand-stand,