[...]... than that they were Arabs The fair singing girls in their [the Umayyads’] dwellings are like gazelles in an empty shallow of RumᶠThey give gifts abundantly in their evening and morning assemblies, they are noble lords, their clients long for their favors In the evening they are like the lamps of a hermit at Mawzan, on whose wicks he has poured oil abundantly On their way to their assemblies they walk... also to the social and political context in which they came into being In the case of Qu3ayr Amra, this was the period when the Umayyads were losing their grip on the caliphate, while the propaganda of their opponents, including their eventual supplanters, the Abbasids, focused on the dynasty’s illegitimacy and the court’s failure—evident at Qu3ayr Amra to measure up to Quranic standards of propriety... Early in the morning of 8 June 1898, the members of the beduin raiding party rose in silence and made ready As the sun came up at 4:19 a.m., Shaykh [alál b al-Fáyiz sprang onto his riding camel Though he said nothing, his men— some five hundred of them—had watched his every movement and mounted in unison.They set off northeastwards in a wide, thin line, sweeping the desert in line abreast Almost four and. .. of my interest in Qu3ayr Amra since 1991, and her parallel researches on al-Ru3áfa have often ª fertilized my thoughts The moral profit of studying the Umayyads is indeed debatable, but there would have been less laughter in these long years of work, had she not been there to share them Together, we also divined something of what the late Don Fowler described in his essay The ruin of Time” as the paradox... different interpretation of the early caliphate is increasingly being heard, and will be aired here too It sees the Syria of the Romans and the Christians—much more than Constantinople—as retaining tremendous cultural impetus, while once the Arabs reunited the Iranian plateau and both halves of the Fertile Crescent under a single political authority, for the first time since the early Seleucids, there was... Qu3ayr Amra seemed extraordinary and puzzling when first published in 1907, and have lost little of their power to mystify Study and restoration have actually increased the number of problems associated with them, and elucidated remarkably few One of the most complete and interesting painted interiors that has survived from the ancient world and at 450 square meters one of the more extensive too— remains... castle of Amra 3 The older man climbed onto the roof and nervously scanned the low hills either side of the wadi Meanwhile his companion made straight for the basalt doorway into the hall Once inside, he examined rapidly but with extreme surprise and curiosity the darkened paintings of hunting scenes, dancing girls, and much besides Emerging again into the intense light outside, 1 John of Nikiu, Chronicle... of jinns Some maintained it had been built by King Solomon himself, who tradition held “was the first to build baths in every place under his dominion, for he had the demons subject to him”,1 especially, according to the Qurºán, jinns who were “builders and divers” 2 What the beduin could not explain and nobody ever has— was the name of this place: Qu3ayr Amra, the little castle of Amra 3 The. .. tampered with by Abbasid editors, we are dealing with materials the Umayyads are likely to have known, in either oral or written form, in something closer to the shape in which we have them than the historical narratives transmitted, for the most part, in versions finalized in the ninth century or later What is more, Qu3ayr Amra s intense concentration and variety of images provides an unusually favorable... of the monument”: “Designed as a summation of memory, an omega-point in which is concentrated all the meaning that a culture wishes to preserve”, its unstable polysemy ends up making of it the starting point not only for historical memory of a fixed moment in the past, but also for desire, and a new journey The Umayyad poet-prince who, I believe, conjured Qu3ayr Amra into being would have found nothing . 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Fowden, Garth. Qu3ayr Amra : art and the Umayyad elite in late antique Syria / Garth Fowden. p Qu3ayr Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria, by Garth Fowden Qu3ayr Amra Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria garth fowden Centre for Greek and Roman Antiquity National. Athens University of California Press berkeley los angeles london University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004