Walls, windows, doors and satellite dishes tessellate at twilight into a patchwork pattern in the madinah, or walled old city, of Fez, Morocco, as a pedestrian passes into view along one of the city’s typically narrow stone streets. Nestled in a valley crowned by gentle hills, Fez is one of the Islamic world’s great historic centers of the art of geometrically based patterns executed in tile, plaster, stone, wood and metal. Like all such patterns, those that adorn the mosques, madrassahs (schools) and sabeels (fountains) of Fez have their origins in simple, universal geometry that— through practice and elaboration—artists and craft workers developed into celestially intricate masterpieces. These adorn Fez in such numbers that the entire madinah is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In May AramcoWorld editor Richard Doughty joined a workshop to learn firsthand from the city’s great works, starting with a straightedge, a compass, a pencil and paper. (And an eraser.)
]]>One evening about 10 years ago, after a family dinner filled with my father’s stories of his childhood and youth in Damascus and Lebanon, my mother and I were in the kitchen when she said, “Someday, we ought to record your father telling his stories.” Many of them told about experiences with his parents and paternal grandparents, whom he referred to using the affectionate Arabic Jiddu and Teta—Grandpa and Grandma.
A few weeks later, the Gallery Al-Quds in Washington, D.C., asked me to consider developing work for a solo exhibition. During the conversation I mentioned the possibility of a show centered around my father’s true stories and, ultimately, his arrival in the us. I told the gallery I envisioned a series of paintings, each based on one of his stories, inspired stylistically by Jacob Lawrence’s famous series, “The Migration of the Negro.”
The gallery loved the idea, but then I had to ask my father for his approval. This turned out to be not so easy. Born in 1927 in Damascus, he moved to Beirut, Lebanon, in 1933, though he returned often to Damascus to visit family. In 1946, he was 19 years old when my grandparents brought him with them to the us.
At first, he refused my request, explaining that these were private family stories. My mother said they would talk it over. About an hour later, my father agreed, reluctantly, to write down his stories.
Many times I would go to my parents’ home in Alexandria, Virginia, and I would sit at the kitchen table while my father showed me a new story he was working on. They were not long, and with each one he added a bit more detail. This enriched my painting, and it also allowed a special intimacy during those conversations. I treasure those times.
We continued over several years, a story here and a story there, until there were 24. After that, he said that was the last one.
I keep hoping he will change his mind.
—Helen Zughaib
When Jiddu told my father this story, he prefaced it by saying his father had told it to him and he must never forget it, and that is how he told it to me.
Once there was an amir [prince] who owned a horse so strong and beautiful that it was known all over the land. Other amirs were envious and tried to buy the horse, but the owner always refused. Selling the horse, he said, would be like selling a member of his family.
One day a crook came to one of the envious amirs and offered, for a price, to steal the horse. The bargain was made.
The crook waited by the side of the road where the amir and the wonderful horse passed each day. When the amir approached, the crook began to cry and wail. The amir stopped to inquire why, and the crook replied he was very sick and needed a doctor, and he was too sick to climb up on the horse. The amir dismounted to help him, and as soon as the crook was seated in the saddle, he took off at a gallop.
The amir called loudly, “Stop and the horse is yours.” The man stopped and returned, knowing that the amir would never go back on his word. “Do not say you stole this horse,” the amir said. “Say that I gave it to you. Do this so that charity and compassion will not disappear from our community.”
In the summer, my sister and I loved to visit Jiddu’s and Teta’s house in the mountains. We were free to play in the garden, make new friends and ride on Jiddu’s donkey. But the best days were those that we spent in the kroum [vineyard]. We had to leave the house very early in the morning because Jiddu insisted that the grapes and figs should be picked when the dew was still on them.
To harvest the figs, Jiddu and I would climb the fig tree, fill our basket with ripe figs and then lower it to Teta and my sister. They spread the figs on cloth sheets, flattened them and then covered them with a clean cheese- cloth to protect them from dust and insects. After about 10 days in the hot sun, the figs would be dried and ready to be put in storage for the winter.
Making raisins, however, was more complicated. Teta took the bunches of grapes and lay them neatly on white sheets covered with straw. My sister always wanted the rows of grapes to be separated by color in long neat stripes of purple, black and white. Teta humored her, even though once they were dried, they would be all mixed up together. After the grapes were lined up to my sister’s satisfaction, Teta sprayed them: She had dipped bunches of herbs, called tayyoun, that grew wild on the slopes adjacent to the vineyard, into a mixture she had prepared from ashes, water and other ingredients, and she shook the liquid on the grapes.
Every day we would return to the vineyards to check on the drying figs and raisins and to moisten the grapes. When it was time to return home, we always left with dried figs, raisins and new stories to share with our friends in the city.
Visiting Jiddu and Teta in their mountain village was always a treat. Teta would have special sweets and my favorite food prepared for me. Best of all though was Jiddu taking me with him to the fields. Sometimes it was a brief trip to see how the plants were growing. But sometimes Jiddu would ask me to be “Jiddu’s helper” and assist with the small chores. During one visit, Jiddu told me that we would be planting olive trees. Because we would be staying in the olive fields all day, we had to bring with us a zuwaidy [picnic lunch], water and other provisions.
The next morning, Jiddu and I set out for the fields much earlier than usual, with a donkey carrying our provisions and small olive plants. We worked hard planting the young olive trees in furrows Jiddu had dug earlier. My job was to hold the plant straight while Jiddu would dig a small hole in the ground for each plant. Then I ladled some water from the water drum on each new olive tree.
During our break for lunch, I told Jiddu that next year I would return to help him harvest the olive crop. He smiled and said that would be difficult because olive trees take many, many years before they bear fruit. Disappointed, I asked him why we were bothering to plant olive trees if we would be dead before they would give us any fruit. He looked at me with a serious expression and said, “Zara’u fa akalna, nazra’u fa ya’kulun.” (“They planted so we would eat; we plant so our descendants will eat.”)
Long before cinemas or television entertained Lebanese children, there was the sanduk al-firji. This was a brightly decorated, semicircular box that was strapped to the back of an itinerant entertainer. He would come into the village loudly chanting previews of the stories he had, going from hara to hara [street to street] and ending in the village square.
First he unstrapped the sanduk. It was about 18 inches high and had five or six glassed portholes equidistant from each other. On either end of the box were two small inner poles attached to a scroll with bright glossy pictures telling one or more of the fabled Arab stories such as “Antar and Abla” or “Abu Zayd al-Hilali.”
He placed the box on a stool and set up a circular bench facing it. The village children took turns handing him their kharjiyyi, spending money, and in groups of five or six, they peeked into the box and watched the story through the portholes. The entertainer rolled the screen, chanting about the beauty of the ladies, the courage of the men and the strength of their horses. Usually the lucky viewers would briefly give up their place to siblings or friends who did not have enough kharjiyyi.
When all those who wanted to see the show were accommodated, the entertainer strapped the show box to his back, picked up the stool and bench, and walked to the next village, chanting previews and enticing new viewers.
It was an amazement to me at the time how he synchronized the chanted story with the pictures on the rolling scroll. And the box, the beautiful sanduk, with its colorful pictures and many tiny mirrors, was a source of wonder, even without the stories.
In the old days, the only water supply for the village was the communal water fountain. Young women, the sabaya, walked to the fountain at sunset, balancing large colorful water jugs on their heads. This walk to get water had become, over time, a much anticipated social event known as the mishwar (“walk”).
At the fountain, the sabaya would show off their fine dresses, chat and gossip. The young men of the village, the shabbab, would also go to the fountain at the same time to watch and innocently flirt with the young women. Occasionally a young man or woman would muster enough courage to say a word or two to a special person.
In time, the mishwar remained an accepted custom, as the young people in the village would take walks in the late afternoon, whether they now had running water in their homes or not. The sabaya and shabbab would meet, admire each other and flirt from a safe distance.
In Syria and Lebanon, Basara is one of the simplest and easiest card games. Older members of the family teach the younger ones how to play it. When everything else fails and you want the younger kids to quiet down and stay out of trouble, playing Basara is the answer.
My grandmother, Teta, was no exception. During inclement weather when we could not play outside, a Basara game would be proposed by Teta. Sometimes we would suggest a game knowing full well there would be treats after the game.
Teta would sit on the rug in her room. We completed the circle sitting around her. Usually she dealt the cards, though sometimes, to please us, she would ask one of us to deal instead.
We liked playing Basara with Teta. She overlooked minor cheating and made sure one of us won. To us, she seemed very old. At the time, we did not know of anyone older. Her colorful headscarf, her mendeel, trimmed with beads, was wrapped around her head. Teta wore several skirts, one over the other, with a bright apron on top. We were fascinated with the skirts. Under two or three of them, she had a homemade cloth bag, a dikki, tied around her waist with a ribbon. In this bag, Teta kept some change and keys. One key, the most interesting to us, opened a small wooden cupboard in her room in which she kept cookies and sweets. Another key opened a large enameled wooden box in which she kept her finer things, her valuables and any large-denomination money.
After the game, we would begin to pester Teta by asking her to show us what she had in her cupboard. When an indirect request to view the inside of the cupboard did not succeed, a united plea for sweets would be uttered. That demand, in various forms, ultimately succeeded, and sweets would be produced and passed around. If and when the sweets were not in abundance, small change we called nigl would be distributed.
Every summer I spent several weeks at my grandparents’ house, which was in Zahle, a mountain village in Lebanon. The best part of the visit would be a trip Jiddu and I would make to the kroum, or vineyard. There we would spend a week working, talking and just being together. During the day, Jiddu and I worked in the field. He would tell me what to do and explain to me why things were done in a certain way. Jiddu spent the day not just talking to me, but he would talk also to the trees and grapevines as if they were people visiting us. In a way, the kroum had become intertwined with the family, part of the community.
As he worked, he would tell me that this tree was planted when Uncle Jamil was born, or this tree was planted when Aunt Wadi’a was married. Every place and plant in the vineyard was connected to something. Sometimes it related to national events or world events, but mostly the connections were to family events. The fields and the kroum had become a diary of family history that he was passing on to me.
Jiddu was also an authority on the wild plants and herbs that grew in and around the kroum. This is good for curing a cold, he would say. This is good for an upset stomach, and this is good to flavor a stew. We would collect many of these herbs and wildflowers and dry them to be used in winter.
Every evening after supper, Jiddu would light the kerosene lamp, brew some herbal tea over the charcoal fire and then begin telling stories about our family. He would tell stories about those who had gone abroad, those who did well and those who did not; the good sheep and the black sheep. And then, if he wasn’t tired, Jiddu would recite poetry or tell stories that usually had a moral or lesson to learn. He never preached to me, but he always made sure I got the message.
More than anything else, Jiddu loved to recite poems, and he loved to hear poetry being recited. Sometimes he would ask me to recite poems I had learned in school. I tried my best, but I could not satisfy his thirst for hearing one poem after another.
Once when I was about 13, he asked me to recite, but I could only remember one poem and part of another. When I stopped reciting, he turned the kerosene lamp off and we went to sleep. The next night he asked me to recite more poetry. I repeated the same poem that I had recited the night before. Jiddu protested that this was the same poetry that I had recited the previous evening. I confessed that it was all I knew. Jiddu looked at me for some time before saying that if after eight years of school, all I could remember was a poem and a half, then I was wasting my time and my parents’ money and that I had better quit school and start working.
After that, Jiddu never asked me to recite anything, though he continued to tell me stories and to teach me about various plants in the vineyard. Poetry, however, never re-entered our life in the kroum.
This ritual was a morning routine that never varied. We grew up with the impression that we, the grandchildren, were not to interfere with the morning’s activities.
Usually, six or seven older women, all widowed, would gather at my grandmother’s house. In the fall, spring and summer, the gathering would take place in the courtyard around the water fountain. In the winter the meetings were held in the living room around the charcoal brazier. Two or three argillas [water pipes] were prepared, and the flavored tobacco mixed and dampened. I loved the smell of the tobacco being prepared because it was usually mixed with carob or grape molasses. The aroma made me hungry for a molasses and tahini sandwich, which we called arouss, the same word for a wedding.
At about 10 o’clock the women would begin to drift in. They did not knock on the door, which was always open anyway. My grandmother would be seated in her usual place, and each woman would sit in her same place. They all dressed the same: black tannouras [long skirts] over several slips, tied around the waist with a sash. On top they wore a black jacket over an embroidered vest, and a light blue or gray mendeel covering their hair. It would be coquettishly tied at an angle, a practice carried over from their younger days.
After they arrived, usually within minutes of each other, my grandmother would begin the coffee ritual. The coffee beans were placed in the mahmassi, a small steel pan with a long handle so that the hand holding it would not be burned. The slowly roasting beans were stirred with a long-handled spoon until my grandmother would determine the color was just right. They were spread on a tray to cool, and then one of the women ground them in the mathani [coffee grinder]. When my grandmother decided enough ground coffee had accumulated in the little wooden drawer in the mathani, she added it to the boiling water in the pot on the brazier and began to stir. When the coffee threatened to boil over, she removed it quickly from the heat, stirred it and returned it to the fire. This process was repeated three times, and the second time, a few teaspoons of sugar were added. Coffee was served in tiny cups, and the conversations began.
What impressed me at the time and until now was that the stories were always the same, told each day by the same woman, and yet the women never seemed to tire of telling or hearing them. They were almost always dated by some important occurrence they all seemed to remember, such as a flood or drought, epidemic or revolution. They recalled their birthdates in the same manner, almost always the time of some calamitous event. My grandmother was born during the tawshi [revolution] of 1865. After any of these events were referred to, there was a chorus of “tinthaker ma tin ‘aad” (“may it be remembered but never repeated”).
As a small boy, living in Bab al-Mussalla in Midan, the old quarter of Damascus, I remember being fascinated by the various peddlers who wandered the narrow streets chanting about their products and services. Sellers of fruits, vegetables and sweets, as well as knife sharpeners, pruners and buyers of old items, all filled the air with their melodic chants. These rhyming chants never actually mentioned the name of the item being offered, but described in detail the color, freshness and taste. Buyers knew by the traditional chants what was being offered for sale, which also would dictate the day’s menu. The streets were crowded with loaded donkeys, pushcarts and peddlers carrying large trays (sddur) piled high with cakes and other tasty things.
Children playing in the street or on their way to school would keep an eye out especially for the sellers of sweets. These were mostly seasonal. Cooked, steaming sweet beets and popcorn were sold in winter. Ice with syrup called sweeq was sold in the summer. Kaak and manaquish were sold year-round, while tamari with molasses were sold only on feast days. Invariably the daily allowance was exchanged for a kaak with za’atar (bread with spices and olive oil), a tamari or a handful of hanblas, a tasty fruit that can be carried in the pocket without being damaged. Usually the sweets were shared or bartered with others, thus expanding the purchasing power of the daily allowance.
I remember the nicest of the peddlers was the Hallab who chanted about his fresh milk. The Hallab had a small flock of eight to ten Damascene goats. The goats were mostly brown, large and gentle. They had two dangling strands from their necks. The small children would stand eye to eye with the goats to pet and hug them on their way to school. The Hallab did not mind, and both the goats and the children loved the attention.
The Hallab carried a pail, a measuring can and a long bamboo stick. When the housewife opened the door and asked for milk, the Hallab would milk one of his goats right there. If she planned to make yoghurt that day, more milk would be required. If the goats began to wander, the Hallab gently guided them back to the herd. After the fresh milk was delivered and the Hallab was paid, he continued on his route, chanting about his beautiful goats.
The other peddlers could not compete with the Hallab, his wonderful goats and the pleasure of petting the gentle and loving animals. I remember that after powdered milk appeared on the grocery shelves, milk never tasted the same again.
In the past, children were born at home with a midwife assisting. This was an occasion when the female members of the family actively participated. They helped the midwife by encouraging the new mother to “bite on a hanky,” to stop her screaming by telling her “sa’adi waladik,” to a certain extent meaning the equivalent of “push.” They also made coffee, tea, zhurat and yansoon drinks for the visitors who flocked in to participate or just to satisfy their curiosity.
As soon as the child was born, the midwife completed her professional duties by informing the father and menfolk of the successful birth and the sex of the child. This was an occasion to pay and tip the midwife. The size of the gratuity depended on the sex of the child and whether the family had desired a boy or girl.
After the midwife was gone, the new mother was dressed in a fancy silk bed jacket, and the baby was wrapped like a papoose in fancy swaddling clothes. The new father entered the room, and depending on his financial circumstances, he put a piece of jewelry on the mother’s pillow and one or more gold coins in the baby’s crib.
From the mother’s bedroom, the zalagheet would begin, which is a kind of chant they did on feast days and other special occasions. It was led by the grandmother, until all the neighbors and family had joined in.
Then for 40 days, the mother stayed in bed pampered and served, changing silk jackets as often as her husband’s wealth permitted. Neighbors, family and friends dropped in to congratulate the parents and to give unsolicited advice and gossip. During this time, the guests were treated to a dish called mughly, which was a mix of spices, powdered rice and sugar.
The mughly is followed by snaniyyi, which is served when the baby gets its first tooth. Snaniyyi is made from boiled wheat, sugar, sweet meats and brightly colored candy. It is piled high on a large tray with maward and mazahar [flowers and rosewater] sprinkled on top. It is beautiful to look at as well as to eat.
To protect against the evil eye and other misfortunes, blue beads, small icons and hijabs are pinned to the clothes and baby’s crib. Blue beads and hands of Fatima protect against the evil eye, while hijabs, amulets and talismans protect the child from illness, microbes and other calamities. The hijab is a sewn small package, triangular in shape, that conceals a talisman or written prayer with spiritual powers to protect the child. When the child grows up, the hijab can be sewn into the inner shirt, to keep the protective powers working. The hijab is never to be opened or disrespected in any way.
One day my father and I were chatting about everything and nothing in particular when he told me the following day he was going to Dayr Saydnaya, and I could accompany him if I wanted to.
The Dayr was a convent in the outskirts of Damascus, and it was his favorite charity. I accepted gladly, as this was one trip I enjoyed and looked forward to.
He asked me what I thought of charity. I replied that people appreciate good deeds because such acts meet their special needs. He then asked me about blind charity, where the donor does not know the recipient and has no idea what the need may be. He proceeded to tell me a story exemplifying this kind of blind charity, which he described as the most sincere.
Once there was a very rich woman, the wife of a governor of a prosperous port city. Once a week she would take a big basket and seal it with tar to make it waterproof. In the bottom of the basket, she would write a line from a poem, “Do charitable deeds even if they may be out of place, for no act goes unrewarded.” Then she would fill the basket with food, water and clothing and drop it in the sea to be carried away by the waves and the wind.
After some time, she and her family took a long boat trip to visit relatives in another port city. Heavy storms demolished their boat, and many on board drowned. She also would have drowned had she not clung to a plank of wood. In time, she drifted to shore where she collapsed with hunger, thirst and exhaustion.
She woke up in someone’s garden. The lady of the house told her the servants had found her on the beach and thought she was dead, but then realized she was still alive, and so they brought her to the garden. The lady of the house said she could stay with them as a washerwoman, and she gladly accepted.
One day the lady brought a big bamboo basket full of laundry and asked the woman to wash them. When the woman reached the bottom of the basket, she saw the line of poetry that she herself used to write in the bottom of those baskets before dropping them in the sea. She had recognized her own basket. She sat down and began to cry.
When the lady of the house came to check on the laundry, she found the woman sobbing. Asking her why she was crying, the washerwoman explained that the basket was one of hers, and she went on to describe how she would fill them with provisions and drop them into the sea thinking that some shipwrecked people would find the baskets and use the food and water to survive.
The lady of the house was amazed, and she told the woman that once she and her husband were shipwrecked. They had lost everything. Then a big basket drifted by, and they clung to it until they landed on shore nearby. When they revived, they walked to the city, found jobs and, in time, prospered. Out of sentimentality, they kept the basket and used it, thinking someday they would learn more about it and the line of poetry written on the bottom in praise of blind charity.
The lady took the washerwoman into her own quarters and, when her husband returned home, told him about the day’s events. He suggested the woman live with them as a member of the family. They also decided to continue to fill the baskets with provisions and drop them into the sea, in hope that someday a needy person would find them and survive.
After a very long wait, permission to travel to America had been granted. Reservations on a ship from Beirut to New York City were made, and a departure date became certain. The goodbyes began in the village. Relatives, friends and neighbors came to drink coffee and exchange stories about others who had emigrated.
Finally, two days before the actual departure, the entire family traveled to Beirut to stay in a hotel and say their final goodbyes. My mother could not believe that she was finally emigrating with her family to America. She got all the passports, tickets and whatever jewelry and money she had in a special handbag, which she held onto even in her sleep.
She also had to be certain that the suitcases packed with gifts for her relatives in America were safe. A large Oriental rug, purchased in Damascus as a gift for her sister, had been wrapped separately and was always kept in her sight. Hotel employees, relatives and I were all fully occupied on guard duty for two days.
On the morning of the departure, it was determined that the ship was too big to come to the pier. The passengers, suitcases, last-minute gifts and the carpet all had to be put in a large rowboat manned by four sailors. My mother insisted that she sit on top of the rug no matter what that did to the stability of the boat. When they were safely on board the big ship, she demanded that the sailors put all the suitcases and carpet in her cabin. They argued that everything not needed on the voyage must be put in the hold. It finally took an officer of the ship to intervene and guarantee that nothing would be stolen.
Today, that carpet rests in a place of prominence in my daughter Karen’s home.
It was the end of the long sea voyage. During dinner the night before we arrived, we learned that the ship, the Vulcania, would be passing by the Statue of Liberty at about four a.m. the next morning. A spontaneous decision was made by some of the younger passengers to see the Statue of Liberty.
And so, 16 days after leaving the port of Beirut for New York City, an exuberant group of us, from Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, stayed up all night to greet with the dawn the Statue of Liberty.
I remember it was a clear morning.
Speaking as an astronomer, physicist, member of parliament and secretary of the Académie des Sciences, François Arago’s words resonated throughout the land. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt had ignited a national passion for all things pharaonic when, from 1798 to 1801, he brought not only occupying soldiers but also more than 150 savants—scholars, cartographers, artists, naturalists, draftsmen and even a musicologist—who recorded the details of ancient sites and modern customs. The result was the mammoth Description de l’Égypte, published between 1809 and 1829 in some two dozen volumes with around 900 plates of engravings. It revealed an Egypt full of more wonders than ever had been imagined, and it left its readers clamoring for more.
Arago even lamented that photography had not yet been invented during Napoleon’s time in Egypt. “Everyone will imagine the extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact and rapid a means of reproduction during the expedition to Egypt,” he told the Académie.
There was little visual record beyond etchings, watercolors, drawings and oil paintings. And no objective record. These were artists’ renderings, observed us scholar Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. “No matter how accurate, paintings, drawings, and prints are always acknowledged as interpretations shaped by the artist’s hand and eye. A photograph, on the other hand, was initially thought to offer a direct, unmediated slice of reality,” he wrote in Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites. At the time, Daguerre’s invention wasn’t regarded as a process by which humans reproduced nature, but rather one by which nature reproduced itself, quickly and objectively.
Daguerre was a painter and stage designer who had created the diorama, a theater of illusion without actors that employed large painted scenes and clever lighting. But his obsession was to capture and fix an image using mechanical means.
Battling his own lack of scientific training, he spent years compulsively experimenting alone, to the point that his wife feared for his sanity. “He has for some time been possessed by the idea that he can fix the images of the camera,” she told a Parisian pharmacist. “He is always at the thought, he cannot sleep at night for it…. I am afraid he is out of his mind. Do you, as a man of science, think it can be done, or is he mad?”
In 1826, Daguerre learned from an optician that another amateur scientist, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, was conducting his own secretive investigations into a light-capturing process he called “heliography.” Daguerre immediately wrote to him, and they met a year later. At first, Niépce was reluctant to divulge details of his work, but at the end of 1829, they formed a partnership.
When Niépce died suddenly in 1833, his son took over the partnership. Daguerre carried on experimenting until, in 1837, he managed to capture an image by sensitizing a silver-coated copper plate with the fumes of iodine, placing it in a wooden box camera, exposing it to the light and then developing it in mercury fumes. He claimed he happened upon this idea when he accidentally left a spoon on an iodized plate onto which light was striking: When he picked up the spoon later, he saw a perfect shadow of it on the plate.
Although the daguerreotype did not reproduce colors, it produced an image with rich tonal gradations that gave it almost a 3-D feel. It was a one-shot process that produced a positive image—in the manner of a modern Polaroid—on a highly reflective, polished surface. Daguerre showed the results of his work to the telegraph inventor Samuel Morse, who was awestruck at the fine detail.
“[The images] are produced on a metallic surface, the principal pieces about 7 inches by 5, and they resemble aquatint engravings, for they are in simple chiaroscuro, not in colors. But the exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it,” Morse wrote to his brother, who published the letter in The Observer, the New York newspaper he edited.
Daguerre found a steadfast champion of his invention in Arago, one of France’s most respected scientists. Arago not only understood the implications of Daguerre’s invention but was also well placed to promote it. He saw its potential to be an important part of French intellectual life and lobbied the government to buy the invention outright and make it freely available.
“France should nobly give to the whole world a discovery that could contribute so much to the arts and sciences,” which would demonstrate France’s supremacy in these fields, he told the Académie.
On August 1, 1839, under a bill passed by the chambers of deputies and signed by King Louis-Philippe, the French government purchased Daguerre’s invention, patent and all details regarding it. In return, Daguerre and Isidore Niépce, his late partner’s son, received pensions. The government gave Daguerre just three weeks to draw up a plan for manufacturing the daguerreotype and to prepare an instruction booklet before making the process public. Daguerre quickly made an agreement with his brother-in-law Alphonse Giroux, whose family business made furniture and cabinets, to produce a slightly improved, commercial version of the apparatus.
The mystery and suspense around the method had been building since January. On August 19, at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts packed with some 200 spectators and several hundred more who stood outside, Daguerre’s photographic process got its first public showing.
Daguerre was a born showman, but perhaps a case of nerves at the prospect of explaining the science behind his invention to a room full of scientists prompted him to let Arago make the historic presentation.
The British magazine The Spectator had reported a few months earlier that the invention was “more like some marvel of a fairy tale or delusion of necromancy than a practical reality.” Now the public saw that simply “making light produce permanent pictures” was not fantasy, reported a German attendee. “The crowd was like an electric battery, sending out a stream of sparks,” he noted. “A few days later, you could see in all the squares of Paris three-legged dark boxes planted in front of churches and palaces.”
The first models of the Giroux daguerreotype camera were ready for sale by the August deadline, and an advertisement for it appeared in the La Gazette de France on August 21. The price: 400 French francs—an average worker’s annual salary.
The kit consisted of a wooden box measuring 30 x 38 x 51 centimeters, with a brass lens mount. At the rear, a box where a ground glass viewing plate would be slid in to allow composition and focus could be switched out for a holder with the prepared, light-sensitive plate. It came with other boxes to hold the chemicals for sensitizing plates and developing the images. Within weeks, the 79-page instruction manual had been translated into both English and German.
Daguerreotypists raced to capture the world’s wonders with their new medium. Egypt was among their first and most desired destinations—along with Greece and Rome—but Arago’s lofty goal of photographing all of the country’s hieroglyphics remained a scholar’s wish amid newly fervent commercial competition.
Aiming to be the first to collect and publish images of the world’s great monuments, the wealthy Parisian optician Noël-Marie Paymal Lerebours equipped a handful of amateurs with cameras and chemicals.
In addition, he offered a commission to the Orientalist painter Horace Vernet, director the French Academy in Rome, and his nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet—the latter to make photographs to complement his uncle’s sketches. The two traveled to Marseille and departed for Egypt on October 21, 1839. They stopped in Italy, Malta and Greece before landing in Alexandria on November 4.
Two days later, the French consul presented the pair to the pasha, Mohammed Ali, an Albanian who had become Egypt’s de facto ruler after the French withdrawal. Mohammed Ali was “lying on his divan in the corner of the living room,” Goupil-Fesquet wrote in 1844 in Voyage d’Horace Vernet en Orient. He questioned his guests on the state of the arts and sciences in Europe and expressed an interest in seeing how the new photographic instrument worked. Vernet and Goupil-Fesquet returned to Ras el-Tin palace on the edge of Alexandria’s harbor the next day at seven a.m. to demonstrate the daguerreotype.
The operation lasted some minutes, and Mohammed Ali was wary. After being exposed, the sensitized, polished mirror was fumed with mercury in a wooden box. The fixed image was then bathed in a solution of hyposulphite of soda and rinsed in distilled water. Although it was a mechanical process that applied science to the arts, it had a whiff of magic about it.
That image from November 7, 1839, is the first documented photograph of Egypt, and indeed of the African continent. The original plate is long gone, but an engraving from it (see top-most banner image) shows an ornate outer gate with two men, perhaps a guard and a doorman, lounging in the open doorway. Behind, with tall windows and low-peaked roofs, stands the palace harem. A couple of trees lean over the fence.
Like the crowd in Paris, Mohammed Ali was awestruck. “His Highness gave way to the increasing sense of wonder and amazement,” wrote Goupil-Fesquet. “‘It is the work of the devil!’ he cried out.”
Nevertheless, Mohammed Ali soon embraced the camera enough to pose for it: a plump, white-bearded ruler with a broad sash, bejeweled belt and an apprehensive expression. According to Goupil-Fesquet, Mohammed Ali even learned to use the camera.
Egypt, it turned out, was an excellent place to work as a daguerreotypist, especially in the cool of winter. It offered photographers good and ample light, which was important for the long exposures daguerreotypes required. Most importantly, it had an abundance of historical places of the highest public interest to capture. Other photographers were not long
in arriving.
That November, Vernet and Goupil-Fesquet met another daguerreotypist in Alexandria, Pierre Joly de Lotbinière. Born in Switzerland, raised in France and, at age 41, a wealthy landowner living outside Quebec, Canada, he was in Paris at the time of Daguerre’s announcement. He was about to embark on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean, and he was fascinated by the new photographic process. Caught up in “daugerreotypomania,” he, too, had secured a commission (as well as equipment) from Lerebours. En route to Egypt, Joly de Lotbinière had stopped in Athens, where in mid-October he had made the first photographs of the Acropolis.
Soon after meeting, the three daguerreotypists made their way south to the splendors of Cairo. “We have been daguerreotyping like lions,” Vernet wrote to a friend. The trio arrived in neighboring Giza to photograph the Sphinx on the same November day. There were just two cameras in all of Egypt, and the photographer behind each was jockeying for the best angle of the same famously enigmatic antiquity.
On November 20, Goupil-Fesquet captured another iconic monument, the Pyramid of Cheops, working from outside a gate that surrounded the complex. The scene, which is known today only through a subsequent engraving (see top banner image), is bucolic, with a saddled camel and three people quietly lounging in the foreground, the pyramid rising behind it in brilliant light. The exposure took 15 minutes.
While Vernet and his nephew began their journey back to Europe soon after that, Joly de Lotbinière traveled up the Nile to photograph landmarks like the temple of Karnak, the Colossi of Memnon, the palace of Medinat Habu and other sites around Thebes, as well as the temples at Kom Ombo, Philae and Abu Simbel. His view of the last shows the 1200 bce monument to Ramses ii buried partially in sand.
Joly de Lotbinière wrote in his diary that he made 92 images on his trip back to France, via Jaffa, Jerusalem, Damascus and Lebanon. By modern standards, that is few for such an extensive journey, but the process to capture a daguerreotype, especially “in the field,” was laborious and demanding.
Daguerreotypists had to carry more than 50 kilograms of equipment, including the camera, plates, a developing box, bottles of chemicals, dishes for mixing, buffs for polishing and a heavy wooden tripod. Taking daguerreotypes was full of disappointments and failures. Plates would not always develop well or at all, due to mistakes on the part of the photographer, extreme heat that changed or neutralized the effects of the chemicals, lack of sufficiently clean water, even insects. Once finished, a plate was highly susceptible to scratches and to deterioration in light: It had to be stored in a velvet-lined case. Today, none of the original plates from either Joly de Lotbinière or Vernet and Goupil-Fesquet survive, and we see their work only through engravings based on them.
Because daguerreotypes were positive images on metal, they could not themselves be reproduced. The pictures had to be hand-copied by artists onto copper plates or engraved onto separate printing plates. Sometimes lines were engraved directly onto the daguerreotype plates.
A handful of images of the travels of Vernet, Goupil-Fesquet and Joly de Lotbinière were published in 1840 and 1841, first in Lerebours’ Excursions daguerrienness: vues et monuments les plus remarquables de globe. Joly de Lotbinière’s images of ancient ruins also appeared in Héctor Horeau’s Panorama d’Égypte et de Nubie (1841).
The medium as a profession or considered as an art form remained in the future. These pioneering travel photographers were enthusiastic amateurs. Vernet and his nephew fulfilled their commission, but they were “primarily interested in gathering authentic raw material for their own paintings and etching,” noted journalist and historian of modern Egypt Max Rodenbeck. There is no record of Joly de Lotbinière taking another photo after he returned to Quebec.
While the daguerreotype’s importance was destined to remain in the history books, its role as the photographic medium of choice in Egypt was short-lived. By 1845, a new process that used calotype paper negatives, which could reproduce further images directly from the original, had already begun to replace it.
For the Egyptian traveler, paper negatives also were lighter and less bulky than the copper plates, and they could be sensitized weeks in advance. While daguerreotypes offered crisp and practically grainless images, the calotype paper negatives absorbed the light-sensitive chemicals and thus lacked the fine details of their predecessor. They looked like monochromatic watercolors in tawny oranges, sepia browns and grays. Yet today it seems that this made the process ideal for Egyptian subjects. The negatives’ paper fibers evoke the textured surfaces of stones and desert, giving a tactile quality to the image, and the overexposed, sulfuric sky lent a feeling of the heat—all without sacrificing the objectivity of a photographic image. Their name was fitting: Calotypes came from kalos, Greek for “beautiful.”
In his original announcement, Arago had pled for the daguerreotype in the service of science. But once the early practitioners had their tripods steadied on Egyptian soil, they seemed to have little interest in merely recording hieroglyphics. Instead, they captured the grandiosity and magnificence of the most famous monuments—and in doing so, they also captured the beauty of the region.
The technology continued to improve and diversify, and the paper negatives were soon superseded by glass ones in the wet-collodion process that combined the sharpness of daguerreotypes with the reproducibility of calotypes. In 1889, 50 years after Daguerre’s invention, a New York company owned by George Eastman marketed the first commercial, transparent roll film and the camera named Kodak No. 1, making photography accessible to the general public.
Ever since then, a camera has been an important traveling companion. “One of photography’s most exalted and dependable functions over the last 150 years has been to supply reports on the look and life of far-off lands,” wrote New York Times critic Andy Grunberg. Beginning with the Pyramids, “pictures have served as our first introduction to the splendid and the exotic.”
The early daguerreotypists enlarged the public’s sense of the world by offering the first mechanically objective images of Egypt’s unique patrimony. They captured the moment when its monuments and murals were beginning to offer modern clues about millennia of culture. They spurred interest in the region and, with it, mass tourism. They stimulated the desire to go and see for oneself—and to capture it with a camera.
For centuries across much of the globe, it has been the custom for women to bring with them on marriage not only money, but also linen, personal clothes and jewelry.
Almost all but the most impoverished women would bring with them the basics needed to set up house. Giving money to enable girls to marry has been a charitable act in much of the Muslim as well as the Christian worlds, and, indeed, the custom of Santa Claus and Christmas gift-giving is thought to have originated with St. Nicholas of Myra (modern Demre in Turkey), who secretly provided money to dowry-less girls.
The value and significance of dowry items have varied greatly, from the sheets and household linen in the bottom drawer traditional in the uk to the “hope chests” of North America, to elaborate trousseaux of jewels, embroidery and weavings intended to show off the family’s wealth or the young woman’s skill.
In many parts of the world, gifts passed to a newly formed household for the new bride—the dowry, whether it may be called that or not—often set a course for a marriage, and sometimes affect its success. Often in times past—and in some places still today—these goods were packed into a chest, traditionally made of wood and typically decorated as richly as means would allow, the better to show it off as a status symbol when the bride arrived at her new home. Across the Middle East, where houses were traditionally sparsely furnished, such a dowry chest would often be placed in the woman’s area, where it could quietly continue to announce its status and serve as an item of practical furniture.
The basic form of most of these chests is large and rectangular. Usually they are flat on top (though some are curved), so that they could be used as a bench or small table; sometimes they were built with drawers below the main compartment and, often, there was a smaller compartment inside the lid for holding valuables.
It can be difficult, even impossible, to determine whether a given chest was in fact intended to serve for a dowry or whether it was commissioned for some other purpose. However, it is probable that the most richly decorated pieces were marriage chests, particularly those decorated with good luck symbols and signs of red paint—the color of celebration, fertility and blood.
Along with one or more large chests, the young bride would often bring a smaller box for her jewelry and makeup. Some of the earliest surviving examples of these are also some of the finest known: for example, the ivory one from Madinat al-Zahra near Córdoba in al-Andalus, a modest-sized box that belonged to the daughter of Abd al-Rahman iii and is dated to shortly after 961 ce, is beautifully and richly carved. Around the edge of the cover, the Arabic inscription translates: “In the Name of God, this is what was made for the Noble Daughter, daughter of ‘Abd al-Rahman, may God’s mercy and goodwill be upon him.”
Small jewel boxes to accompany the bride continued to be popular well into the 20th century. A hardwood type with a “house roof” lid made of four flat, sloping slabs of wood with decorative brass hinges and locks was widely exported from India; another model, often made in Damascus using camel bone or mother-of-pearl inlay, has historically been favored by wealthy Bedouin. There are also the chests from the Iran-Pakistan border region called makran with heavy brass decoration, which also seem to have been made for export, especially to East Africa.
Large chests for dowries and other uses of course also existed, but relatively few have survived. There are numerous mentions of them in Arabic literature, and they also appear among documents in the Cairo Genizah. (See sidebar) The 14th-century Mamluk-era historian Al-Maqrizi describes the chests available at the specialized market in Cairo. Some combined chest and taht, or a daybed (like those still being made in Java during the early 20th century), while others, also called muqaddimah, were made of leather or sometimes bamboo, and they seem to have been in use as cosmetics boxes.
Decoration on dowry chests varies from region to region, depending on local taste and available materials. Sheila Unwin, author of The Arab Chest, concedes it is hard to date many chests or even give them a provenance since little appears to have been written about them before the arrival of Europeans. Generically, they are known by a number of names: mandoos, sanduq and safat are three of the most common. More specific types are often referred to by a place name—Omani, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Zanzibari, etc.—but these often refer to where they were acquired, rather than where they were made.
Most of the older chests used to come from India, thanks to its abundance of hardwoods, teak and rosewood especially. Scholars have argued that the Portuguese sailor’s chest—generally a plain strongbox with brass corners, hinges and a lock that served like the modern military footlocker— inspired the general idea, but the decoration was a purely local innovation. The more elaborate of the Indian chests might have had drawers at the bottom (generally three) and could be placed on a stand to protect them from damp and insects.
According to Unwin, chests imported from India could be classified into four main types. The top three were the most striking and sought after: Surat, Bombay and Shirazi. This last was not made in Shiraz (now in Iran), but found in the areas of Persian influence. All were built in long-lasting teak or other hardwoods, and they were decorated with designs of brass studs and sometimes brass plates cut into geometrical or scrolling appliqués, which became increasingly elaborate in the course of time.
Some of the most expensive were lined with camphor or sandalwood that protected the contents against insects and gave them a delicious scent. These chests sometimes have traces of red paint, indicating their use for holding the dowry, and they were often set on separate wooden feet painted in stripes. The carpentry of the finer chests cleverly inserts secret drawers and tuck-away compartments to hide special treasures. This is the style of chests that came to be copied around the eastern Arabian Peninsula, especially in Oman.
The Shirazi chests were particularly elaborate, as Unwin describes, with “sparse heavy cast brass plating ... [and] diamond-shaped disks.” One of the rare dated examples belonged to Sayyida Salme, the daughter of the early 19th-century Omani sultan of Zanzibar Said bin Sultan al-Said, and it is now in the Sultan’s palace. Salme married a German merchant in 1866 and fled Zanzibar, which gives a probable date for the chest. Married as Emily Ruete, her autobiography, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess, published n 1907, sheds unique light on the period.
Another less common type came from Malabar, in southwest India. The “Malabar chest” is carved, often in mahogany, rosewood, shisham or other hardwoods, and a favorite pattern uses a round central vase—lota—with trails of flowers and fruit, sometimes grapes or pomegranates. The design shows Portuguese influence, although that particular motif suggests fertility and good luck from Europe into East Asia and it is particularly appropriate for weddings.
The mixture of cultural elements is not limited to Portugal, India and the Arab world. The traditional way of securing the chest was with a hasp, often very decorative, and padlock. While locks and keys were a Portuguese and Dutch innovation, another locking device, one that uses three rings and a padlock, came from China, as did the design of some of the handles and hinges.
Other evidence of cultural tastes and traditions appears in the ornamentation. Designs of metal wire with inlays of mother-of-pearl or camel bone, for example, originated in Egypt-Syria during the ninth and 10th centuries. This style was typically produced for the well-to-do urban classes, while most of the rest of the population used plain or carved chests. Complex woodworking crafts such as intarsia and marquetry were popular throughout the Ottoman territory, and in the 19th century such chests were exported to Europe, especially to France. Chests were commissioned, as were sets of furniture in the European style, for weddings. The patterns tended to be extremely elaborate, sometimes with the entire chest covered in mother-of-pearl and lined with scented wood or silk brocade or velvet.
The manufacture of these types of inlay was a specialty of Damascus, although by the late 20th century there were far fewer craftsmen working than in the past, with commissions arriving largely from the Arabian Peninsula. Again, changing traditions, fashions and economies have led to very few traditional dowry chests being made, and instead, chests of drawers, cupboards and other more modern designs are favored.
In North Africa, fine hardwood is difficult to come by, and as a result, dowry chests are generally painted, as soft woods such as pine or palm do not lend themselves well to delicate carving. Families of modest means might have a plain coffer decorated with a simple pattern, such as the row of arches common all across the Muslim world, in two or three colors. Damages to the lids, including nicks and burns, indicate that many chests served a variety of purposes besides containing valuables.
Wealthy homes would often have much larger chests, some even too tall to sit on or to serve as work benches. Many were elaborately painted, with dark red being a favorite background color and designs often including stylized flowers and plants. One favorite design is a large central roundel with a bowl of fruit or vase of flowers—both universal symbols of celebration and fertility; another shows a pair of doves drinking from a fountain, perhaps copied from early-Christian sarcophagi, which in the 19th century were still to be seen in the countryside, even being used as horse troughs. In Tunisia, fish are a popular motif, sometimes shown swimming in a circle, since fish not only represent fertility, but also are considered to bring good fortune and protection against the evil eye.
Morocco also has its own wider tradition of painted furniture, but here, geometric patterns that often match with the architectural decoration are the norm, and the arched design is particularly popular. Old pieces are rare, but there is a flourishing reproduction industry, although the colors used tend to be brighter than the originals. Traditional Moroccan chests sometimes have curved tops, a detail that is probably the result of Spanish and Portuguese influence, particularly along the coast.
In contrast to North Africa where hardwood was scarce, far to the east, in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, good-quality Himalayan cedar wood was so abundant that it was a prime material for everything that could be made out of it, from buildings to plates and bowls—and of course chests. Carving there is a highly prized skill, and chests form an important part of the furnishings of every house, although once again it is hard to establish which particular ones have been specially made for the dowry.
Chests from Swat normally stand on quite high legs that continue up above the body of the chest to recall slender minarets. The top and bottom borders of the chests are often worked in a toothed or scalloped pattern. Like the fine chests found in the Arabian Peninsula, they are made with fitted joints rather than nails. The fronts of the chests often have two or more panels, and they normally open with a sliding or hinged door at the front, rather than from the top; the door is closed with a hasp and padlock instead of a key. The carving is generally geometric or with stylized garlands of leaves and flowers—which likely symbolize the sun’s disk—and the usual architectural arches. Some chests have completely different patterns on the two front panels, and some experts have suggested that these distinct designs represent bride and groom, but this is not certain.
It must be added that chests, while very widespread, were by no means a universal tradition for dowry objects throughout all the many Islamic cultures and regions of Islamic influence. For example, baskets, which are cheaper than chests though less durable, are favored in rural Yemen. Many areas of Indonesia have a strong tradition of container-making from a variety of leaves and fibers, and some dowry boxes made this way are worked in different colors and sometimes embellished with cowries. Wealthy Indonesian families would sometimes have chests of the Omani type, imported through their trade connections, or ones of the Dutch colonial type, or yet others showing Chinese influences. Village Java, in particular, produced magnificently carved hardwood chests—grobog—one style of which was designed to double as a daybed; yet again, it is rarely clear which of these were specifically intended for the dowry.
Fashions, traditions and social expectations change. In the us, the hope chest has long since given way to the “bridal shower.” Dowries, too, have changed and often disappeared—and so have the chests. Few of the very beautiful and elaborate ones are still being made, or, if they are, it is more for neo-traditional interior decoration than a bridal trousseau. Where they still exist, scarcity of fine wood and skilled craftsmen, and the abundant competition of inexpensive, industrial alternatives have perhaps forever changed the style of the dowry chest. When a dowry chest is still used, it now tends to be a tin or galvanized steel trunk, a footlocker, rather than a artisanal wooden chest. Better than wood against damp and insects, the metal chests are still called sanduq ‘arus, or “wedding box,” and they are still often imported to Arabian Gulf countries from India. But instead of brass studs, carving and marquetry, they are painted with enamel designs that often show mosque domes, reminiscent of the architectural designs on the older chests, although in color, red still tends to predominate.
Dowries of embroidery and weaving may be long out of fashion, but the chests themselves become more and more desirable as they become rarer, social and artisanal artifacts of a bygone era.
Some travelers look forward to packing their cases and hitting the road, but for those forced out of their hometowns and away from their mother countries against their will, travel has an entirely different meaning—one of separation, loss, and an often desperate act of survival.
For Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Salmani, born in the town of Loja near Granada in the year 1313, travel abroad meant more than mere exile. An accomplished poet and minister in the Nasrid court of Granada during its heyday, when the Alhambra palace was getting its most brilliant finishing touches, he and his sovereign, King Muhammad v, were obligated to flee for their lives to Morocco, to the safety of the court of the Merinid Sultan, when the king’s half-brother launched a palace coup in the year 1359.
And it was in Morocco, based in the seaside town of Salé but often camped outdoors in the wilds of the mountainous interior, that this most erudite and refined man—author of more than 60 works ranging from political theory, veterinary medicine and history to mysticism, administrative science and collections of his prodigious correspondence (which included a letter sent to none other than the Arab world’s most famous traveler of all time, Ibn Battuta, by then long retired from his own journeys around the world)—began also to write travelogues.
Three of them are most playfully entitled: Mi’yar al-ikhtiyar fi ahwal al-ma’ahid wa al-diyar (The Measurement of Choice in the Conditions of Places and Buildings); Khatrat al-tayf fi rihla al-shita wa al-sayf (The Appearance of a Ghost During a Trip of Winter and Summer); and Nufadat al jirab fi ‘ulalat al-ightirab (The Shaking of the Bag for Entertainment While Abroad).
His contemporary polymath and friend Ibn Khaldun said he “possessed an unequal linguistic habit and his pupils followed in his footsteps.” What Ibn Khaldun did not say was that his pupil and equally brilliant poet Ibn Zamrak was the source of his friend’s eventual undoing. Spanish Arabist Emilio García Gomez called him the last great man of letters in Al-Andalus because “after having thrown away the key, he turned out the lights and left it in the dark.”
Those who doubt the excellence of his poetic voice need only read his verses, some in gilded letters on a lapis background inscribed in stucco on the walls of
the Alhambra.
See with your own eyes the delight in me,
And admire my shape and adornments …
Let God who is without form or space give shape
To my creator’s most remote desire.
Known to history under the delightful name Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (Tongue of Religion, Son of the Sermon-Giver) or, more simply, Ibn al-Khatib, he also accrued three other more telling nicknames. During his lifetime he was known as Dhu al-wizaratayn (He of the Two Ministries), because after three years in exile, he was able to return to Granada, when Muhammad v reclaimed the throne, and resume office.
After his death in 1375, which occurred during his second Moroccan exile and in the shadow of yet further intrigue, his biographer, al-Maqqari, renamed him with the dual monikers Dhu al-‘Amrayn and Dhu al-Mayyitayn (He of the Two Lives and He of the Two Deaths). These were references to the fact that Ibn al-Khatib’s prolific writing was due in part to insomnia: Working by day and night, he accrued the equivalent of two lifetimes; his death, indeed, was by a kind of double execution— strangulation followed by immolation.
Of his travelogues, The Appearance of a Ghost is the more straightforward. It recounts a 21-day journey in the spring of 1347 from Granada to Almería in the company of his Nasrid sovereign Yusuf i, father of Muhammad v, to inspect the kingdom’s defensive perimeter.
Ibn al-Khatib seemingly does the impossible by turning a dry trip report into a literary tour de force of rhymed and rhythmic prose, touching on the descriptions of towns large and small, many of whose names come from the Arabic—Guadix (wadi, or “valley”), Gor (ghor, or “declivity”), Almazora (mahsour, or “restricted”), Almanzora (mansour, or “victorious”) and Purchena (burj, or “tower”)—before arriving at his destination, “a city that guards the independence of the realm, a flourishing city where caravans and fleets keep their rendezvous, a town that hoists its flag of pristine honor and shows itself to be first among its rivals.”
The Legado Andalusí Foundation in Granada has created a tourist map, called Ruta de Ibn al-Jatib (Spanish scholars transliterate “kh” as “j”), which tracks this exact itinerary, with stops along the way to see a mudéjar wooden inlaid ceiling in a former mosque in the town of Baza and the Moorish castle in Lorca. The narrative has been translated into Spanish by Jacinto Bosch Vilá and Wilhelm Hoernerbach.
The Measurement of Choice was written as a maqama, a short-barrel, scattershot literary form invented by the Arabs that aimed to impress readers with impossible-to-match rhetorical extravagances. In his, Ibn al-Khatib wrote of 34 cities in Al-Andalus, including Malaga, Granada and Ronda, which he compared to the Moroccan towns Tangier, Meknes, Ceuta and Fez that he had more recently visited as an exile. Despite being far away, he fondly recalled his childhood home of Loja and its women “who cure broken hearts and rabbits that seem awake while sleeping.”
On the other hand, The Shaking of the Bag—a miscellany of praise poems, history and geography, and personal narrative based on his trips from the High Atlas back finally to Al-Andalus—is far less straightforward. Its vocabulary has been studied for covert meanings, of the inside story within the outside story of a physical journey.
“I am nothing but a wanderer of the road,” he wrote, “who has fled this world as a lion, to isolate myself from it, just as I separate body from soul…. Abstinence from all that men desire brings me wisdom and money to give as alms to others.” Simple travelogue it is not, but rather a kind of secret diary of a man-in-exile’s attempt to save himself from the political storms back home and those he felt were sure to come again.
One might find it strange that Ibn al-Khatib chose his place of exile in Salé rather than the more sumptuous Merinid capital of Fez, calling it “a sandy ground, with water of poor quality … with mosquitoes … its people avaricious and of low intelligence.” But historians speculate that at this point in his life he was set on establishing his own identity, to avoid being too closely associated with a deposed king whose time and fortune he feared were now finished.
These thoughts play out most evidently when he goes up the High Atlas to meet the shaykh of the Hintata tribe, Amir Ibn Muhammad ibn Ali. In the person of the amir, Ibn al-Khatib was eager to find a patron unrelated to and in fact more powerful than the ruling Merinid dynast, because a royal protector he knew could be as easily deposed as was his own patron, Muhammad v.
Indeed, the greatest Merinid sultan of all, Abul Hassan Ali ibn Othman, had expanded his territory across the Algerian coast as far as Tunis, commanding at one point some 40,000 Zinata Berber cavalrymen and troops of Andalusi Arab footmen, and then, following a bad turn in his military campaign, had been dethroned, captured and executed by his son Abu Inan
in 1351.
Ibn al-Khatib calculated that he would need friends in high places whose power was enduring, not fleeting, and thus he looked beyond political dynasties toward the Atlas tribe that had once loyally sheltered Abul Hassan. For a man fluent in the recondite language of diplomacy, to approach and praise such rough-hewn mountain men meant that Ibn al-Khatib felt deeply pressed to seek far and wide a fail-safe insurance policy offering both haven and protector in the event he once again must flee for his life.
Outside Marrakesh in the direction of the Hintata territory, near North Africa’s highest summit, Jebel Toubkal, lies Aghmat, the first capital of the Souss region. It had fallen into such decline—“a place as ugly as it tried to be beautiful,” he wrote—that it had become a miserable place of exile for many former rulers of the petty kingdoms of Al-Andalus, the so-called Taifa states, broken away from the Caliphate in Córdoba.
Two of these were also men of high literary talent, the poet and last Abbadid king of Seville, Al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad, and the last Zirid king of Granada, Abdallah ibn Buluggin, who wrote his memoirs there. In visiting Aghmat in the footsteps of his fellow Moors, Ibn al-Khatib must have been making a literary pilgrimage as much as he was reconnoitering a safe haven.
We propelled ourselves to climb the crowning mountain like a rapacious bird hanging over our ascent, flanked by the tribal lands of the Hintata, they who are supporters of the state, intimates of the Merinid dynasty, sworn to its obedience, noted for their loyalty, ready to risk their life before they would profane it, to keep a promise and a friendship, deserving above others all prestige. This was the chief incentive for my route, the most simple reason for my trip.
Ibn al-Khatib relates how he sought to make the Merinid amir’s acquaintance, concluding with a 12-line qasida addressed directly to him whose lines include “By God, how you maintain happiness! / By God, what lucky fortune keeps you safe!” The central part of the narrative is not the difficulty of the steep ascent but rather the luxury of its banquet at the summit: “Barely were we seated, relieved of our shoes, when a meal was served that drowned the very sea and flooded its very waves.”
The Shaking of the Bag recounts the return of Ibn al-Khatib to Granada following the reinstatement of Muhammad v to the Nasrid throne, before finally concluding with the account of a ceremony at the Alhambra, the Prophet’s moulid, or birthday celebration, on December 30, 1362. He describes the guest list, menu, palace décor and the king’s attire. “The sovereign’s visage dazzled the eyes,” he wrote, “and what pleased him most was that instead of a crown, he wore a special turban which as of that night became the royal-most symbol of Al-Andalus.
“Scribes, travelers and officials jaded by other such festivals all recognized that this convocation, as much for its location as for its cuisine, music and chronometer [a timekeeping device for measuring the night hours that had been demonstrated], was an event without precedent, that never would be outdone or even repeated.”
A poem by Ibn al-Khatib inscribed in the Court of Myrtles captures the night’s magical setting:
With my jewels and with my crown I surpass the most beautiful,
And before me the stars of the zodiac all bow down ...
It is as though I had received the gift of that bounty which
Flows from the hand of my lord Abu al-Hajjaj[Yusuf i, his former patron]
Thus out of his shaken bag poured many jewels and stars. In his travelogues, Ibn al-Khatib always wrote about more than simple arrivals and departures and the stopping places in between. He wrote in the highest form of Arabic literary prose, and signed his name upon the Alhambra itself. The millions of tourists from all over the world who visit the palace each year see his verses adorning its walls in praise, even if few can now read them.
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. Adapted from the original by Hamid Triki, which appeared in issue number 11, titled “Ibn Al-Jatib: El hombre y sus dobles.”
There are no melons like Khorezmian melons,” he wrote, “maybe with the exception of Bukharian ones, and the third best are Isfahan melons. Their peels are green, and the flesh is red, of extreme sweetness and firm texture. Surprisingly, they cut melons into slices, dry them in the sun, put them into reed baskets as it is done with Malaga figs, and take them from Khorezm to the remote cities in India and China to sell. They are the best of all dried fruit.”
Six hundred and eighty-one years later, I arrived in Urgench in early August after a bone-jarring, 12-hour drive by vintage, Russian-built Lada taxi from Bukhara across the forbidding wasteland of the Kyzyl-Kum (“Red Desert”). I had come in search of Ibn Batutta’s melon.
Cucumis melo, the sweet dessert melon that we know today, belongs to the family Cucurbitaceae—the gourd family, which also includes zucchini, pumpkins, squash and cucumbers. The sweet melons of Central Asia have a convoluted and complex history that continues to confound taxonomists and botanical experts. According to the book Melons of Uzbekistan, which was based on a scientific survey by the Uzbek Research Institute of Plants carried out in 2000, Cucumis melo is thought to have come from the sub-species agrestis Pang, a bitter, sour-tasting melon still found growing wild in Central Asia.
It is unclear exactly when sweet melons were first developed in Khorezm, an area encompassing much of modern Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and northern Iran, as well as ancient Persia, which included part of northeastern Iraq. These two areas are likely the source of all sweet melons grown throughout the world today.
The earliest written mention of the sweet melons of Khorezm appears in Paradise of Wisdom, written in 850 ce by Ali ibn Sahl al-Tabari, who mentioned long, sweet melons in his chapter on vegetables. In the Arabic translation of Dioscorides’ first-century ce De Materia Medica (On Medical Matters) produced around 990 in Samarkand by Al-Husayn ibn Ibraim al-Natili, there is an illustration depicting the vines and ripe yellow fruit of Cucumis melo. The caption names it qawoun; in modern Uzbek, the word for sweet melon is qovun. Writing a bit earlier, in 955, Muhammad Abu al-Qasim ibn Hawqal, who traveled widely in Khorezm, described a long melon that was qabih al-mandar (ugly), but ghaya fi al-halawa (highest sweetness). He also mentioned that the melons were cut up, dried and “sent to numerous places in the world.”
According to descriptions in the 11th century by Abu al-Khayr, sweet melon seeds, most likely of the casaba variety, made their way from Khorezm to al-Andalus around that time as a result of Islamic territorial expansion, trade and agricultural development. The seeds were conveyed along the maritime trade route linking the western Indian subcontinent to Egypt via the Red Sea and from there across the Mediterranean to Muslim Iberia—al-Andalus. Around the mid-15th century, Armenian merchants brought melon seeds overland to Italy. Sweet melons’ wild popularity there is evidenced by the fact that in 1471 Pope Paul ii died from eating too many of the sweet melons from the papal gardens of Cantalupo (from which we get the name “cantaloupe”).
In his 1895 book Travels in Central Asia, ethnologist and British spy Arminius Vambrey described the melon route from Khorezm east to China and northwest to St. Petersburg, in which melons were carried by caravans of 1,000 to 2,000 camels. Vambrey wrote:
....and fruits, the superior merit of which not Persia and Turkey alone, but even Europe itself, would find difficult to contest … but above all, to the incomparable and delicious melons, renowned as far as even in remote Pekin, so that the sovereign of the Celestial Empire never forgets, when presents flow to him from Chinese Tartary, to bring some Urkindji [Urgench] melons. Even in Russia they fetch a high price, for a load of winter melons exported thither brings in return a load of sugar.
Captain Frederick Burnaby, in his 1876 book A Ride to Khiva, made similar observations:
Melon traders would shovel up snow and ice during winter and store it in deep underground cellars. Then in summer the most succulent melons were packed with ice and placed in large lead containers. These were then heaved onto camels to journey across the deserts to the banqueting tables of the Tsar of Russia, the Emperor of Peking and the Mogul rulers of Northern India.
Burnaby had the good fortune of tasting an aged Khorezm melon in the middle of a Khiva winter. “Anyone accustomed to this fruit in Europe,” he wrote, “would scarcely recognize its relationship with the delicate and highly perfumed melons of Khiva.” He added that “throughout the winter, melons are preserved according to an old method where they are put into straw or net bags and then hung from the ceiling of a special warehouse called a kaunkhana [qovunxona, or melon house].”
Today, Central Asia and in particular Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkmenistan (where Melon Day is a national holiday) are considered to grow the world’s best aromatic, sweet dessert melons. Of the older varieties, the Gurvak of Khorezm in Uzbekistan, the Gulobi of Turkmenistan, the Asqalan of northern Afghanistan and the Jharbezeh Mashadi from Iran are legendary among experts. The farmers of Uzbekistan, in the areas of Khorezm, Karakalpakstan, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Surkhandarya, Kashkadarya, and Fergana Valley have been developing and improving sweet melons for thousands of years, and these types of melons are just now beginning to appear in specialty and ethnic grocery stores and farmer’s markets in California.
My journey to Khorezm started in Sacramento, California, when I paid a visit to Corti Brothers, a family-owned grocery store. There I found a towering pile of long, cream-colored melons called Mirza. They were priced at $2.50 a pound; other more conventional melons were selling for 25 to 60 cents a pound. I had never paid $22 for a melon, but I drove home with my purchase and, within two hours, had eaten the melon at a single sitting. The next morning I went back for more. The texture, taste, fragrance and melting sweetness of the luscious pale green flesh was like no melon I had ever eaten. It made me think of Ibn Battuta’s melon, and it made me wonder if it was still in cultivation.
Store owner Darrell Corti gave me the name of his Mirza melon supplier, and within a week I was in the high desert of Kern County, California, driving a rutted gravel road in search of Armenian immigrant and farmer Ruben Mkrtchyan, who had 1½ hectares of Uzbek melons under cultivation. After field trials of 28 different varieties in 2012, Mkrtchyan had settled on two: Obinavat and Mirza. Overripe or cosmetically flawed Mirza melons are sliced, sun dried and braided into a traditional Uzbek delicacy.
Mkrtchyan told me of his difficulties obtaining rare seeds from older varieties that are now starting to disappear. For example, he said, the seeds of one variety, the Jarbezeh Mashadi, which has been in continuous cultivation for 700 years, were smuggled from Iraq to France and then into the United States in the heel of a shoe (not his). Another variety, Battikh Samarra (melon of Samarra, a city in northern Iraq), goes back to the Abbasid Dynasty of the 11th century. (In Arabic, battikh can refer to either watermelons, Citrullus lanatus, or sweet melons, Cucumis melo.) When I heard the age of these two varieties, my idea to go in search of Ibn Batutta’s melon no longer seemed so far-fetched.
A month later, while visiting Mkrtchyan’s melon stall at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles, I fell into conversation with one of his first and most loyal customers: celebrity chef, restaurateur and philanthropist Wolfgang Puck, who was there to buy melons for his family. Puck was ecstatic about Uzbek melons, and he referred to Mkrtchyan as “The King of Melons.” Two weeks later I was on my way to Uzbekistan.
In Tashkent, I met Muhabbat Turdieva and Abdumalik Rustamov, co-authors of The Melons of Uzbekistan. Of the 160 varieties they described, there appeared to be several that matched Ibn Battuta’s description, but when I asked which exactly it might be, there was a long silence followed by a robust and lengthy professional debate over the numerous possibilities. Clearly no one had given much thought as to just which variety Ibn Battuta had described, or whether it was still under cultivation. There were almost too many to choose from.
Central Asian melons, they explained, are roughly divided into the following groups: Early ripening Khandalaks; early-summer, soft-pulp Bukharica and Gurvak; summer solid-pulp Amiri; summer and autumn-winter Cassabas and autumn-winter Zard. Many of the 160 varieties also had different common names according to regional dialects. One variety named after a certain breeder in one area might be known elsewhere by the distinctive color pattern on its rind, or even by an “expression of feelings.”
At lunch that day, Turdieva, whose title is forest genetic resources scientist, described her work assessing the distribution, diversity and conservation of local tree species, fruit crops and melons in Central Asia. Sustainable use of local varieties and conservation of their wild relatives are some of her special interests. During the melon expedition in 2000, she was involved with the survey of melon-growing areas, the study of farmers’ plots, the listing of melons grown and the description and collection of melon seeds from old varieties. In addition to cataloging melon varieties, her work aimed at “enhancement of the use of melon genetic resources.”
Uzbekistan’s melons enjoy their well-earned reputation for their unusual flavor and sweetness. Of the countries in the region, Uzbekistan has the largest amount of land devoted to melons. The total cultivated area comes to nearly 40,000 hectares of land, which yields approximately 450,000 - 500,000 tons of melons every year. Domestic consumption is high, and the largest export market is Russia. Turdieva expressed her concern about the loss of old melon varieties not only due to agribusiness pressures but also because generations of farmers and amateurs were no longer saving seeds the way they used to. To help protect the diversity of these historic and precious melon varieties, scientists now carry out regular seed-collecting expeditions and seed exchange programs to save these melon varieties for future generations of growers, breeders and researchers. To protect the old varieties, Uzbekistan now has one of the largest melon germplasm collections in the world with 1,330 accessions.
With only 12 days and an entire country to search, I had little time to waste. I contacted my friend Zafar Jahongirov, and that afternoon we began the melon hunt at Tashkent’s sprawling market, Chorsu bazaar. We sampled Mkrtchyan’s varieties— Obinavat and Mirza—and I found them as delicious as their California counterparts. We wandered into the cavernous dried fruit section, where I saw braided, dried melon and dried melon strips rolled up by hand, stuffed with large, seedless black raisins called Qorakishmish. The melon strips looked like caramelized dried apples, but that is where the similarity ended. Imagine the flavor of an entire, ripe melon, at the peak of perfection, concentrated into a single, chewy, toffee-like, melon-scented bite.
Marco Polo, in the late 13th century, had also sampled these: “They are preserved as follows: a melon is sliced, just as we do with pumpkin, then these slices are rolled and dried in the sun, and finally they are sent for sale to other countries, where they are in great demand for they are as sweet as honey.”
Jahongirov explained that autumn and winter melons of the Zard variety are still hung up to slowly ripen in qovunxona, the traditional drying sheds (“melon house”) mentioned by Burnaby. Harvested as early as September, properly stored winter melons can last from two to eight months. The melons become sweeter and juicier with the passage of time as the starches gradually convert to sugars until they attain a complex musky, perfumed melon flavor. After exploring the markets of Tashkent, we hit the road, stopping at every roadside stall, market place and melon shop along the way to Urgench, 1,119 kilometers down the road.
“Tatip ko’ring! Tatip ko’ring!” (“Taste it! Taste it!”) cried out the vendors at every stop, generously cutting samples from their best and offering them to us on the tip of a knife. We tried Kampir Qovun, known as “Old Lady melon” because it is wrinkled on the outside but sweet on the inside. We caught the very end of the season for Gurvak, which seems to be most people’s favorite. We sampled Andarxon, a fall and early winter melon; the Bishagi, which means “formless” because the melon comes in an assortment of shapes, and another favorite, Oq Novvot (White Sugar). There was a wrinkled, canary-yellow melon called Tirshek that is eaten fresh or hung up to age over the winter months. Many of the melons were not even among the 160 listed in Melons of Uzbekistan. One was nicknamed The Dog’s Head; another, Flower-Water; and yet another, The Queen Mother.
I asked many of the melon growers and their customers if they had heard of Dioscorides’ first-century ce advice to place a hollowed-out melon rind on the head of a child to bring down a fever or as a treatment for heat stroke. No one had heard of this, but all laughed and agreed a melon-rind helmet would be an excellent idea for anyone in the heat of an Uzbek summer.
After nearly two weeks on the road sampling dozens of melons each day, I finally arrived in Khorezm province at the well-known roadside Beruni melon market, near the banks of the Amu Darya river—very close to where Ibn Battuta tasted the best melon of his life. At the market, I met a kind, elderly, white-haired melon vendor by the name of Gulistan (Land of Flowers) and her two grandsons. Like most melon growers I encountered, she knew the story of Ibn Battuta’s melon, and she soon set her mind to deciding which variety it might be. As she mulled this over, I realized that in the previous two weeks I had not seen a single melon with a green rind and red flesh. I was beginning to wonder if Ibn Battuta had described a watermelon, Citrullus lanatus.
Gulistan dismissed my skepticism. She told me that it sounded like Ibn Battuta was describing a late-summer melon such as an orange-fleshed Gurvak, or the light reddish-fleshed Ichi-qizil (“red-core”), or possibly a long-ripening winter melon of the Zard variety. Unconvinced, I continued my search.
That evening, I sent a hasty email to my friend Tim Mackintosh-Smith, the Oxford-educated Arabist, writer and lecturer who lives in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Mackintosh-Smith is the author of an award-winning book and BBC trilogy in which he followed in the footsteps of Ibn Battuta, and he is arguably one of the foremost scholars on all aspects of Ibn Battuta. I mentioned the passage in the Gibb translation of Ibn Battuta’s rihla, or account of his journeys, that described the Khorezmian melon with the green rind and the crisp red flesh.
Mackintosh-Smith wrote back: “IB’s Arabic word is ahmar which can indeed be plain ‘red’. But Arabic colours are notoriously slippery. Sometimes they have a ‘green’ donkey for sale in the donkey market behind my house, but I think it is a shade of what we would call grey. Poets often describe the skin of especially beautiful women as ‘green’. I am pretty sure that ahmar for IB would have covered anything from watery pastel pink to deep purple; and green could mean anything from the palest shade of lime green to the densest pine forest at midnight. And the precise time of year is also problematic because Ibn Battuta was notoriously vague about dates. He describes a frozen lake to the south of Urgench, so this would suggest he was describing a fall/winter melon.”
Taking all of this into consideration, I expanded my search to include all melons that might or might not have a vaguely greenish rind with a flesh possibly, but probably not, tinged with a light reddish orange—or something similar. We were running out of time, and I had to make my best guess.
At 3:30 a.m., two days before I left Uzbekistan, Zafar and I drove into a meandering and nameless open-air roadside melon market. The vendors were all asleep. We approached a stall with a large selection of the Ichi-qizil melons that Gulistan had mentioned. It wasn’t a winter melon, but in all other aspects it matched Ibn Battuta’s description in terms of taste, texture, color and region of origin.
Zafar woke the woman who ran the stall. She climbed from her wooden bed piled high with blankets and surrounded by a sea of hundreds of melons. Other nearby vendors were sleeping with their own melons. She turned on a single overhead bare light bulb. Zafar explained our long journey in search of Ibn Battuta’s melon.
“Ibn Battuta’s melon, at this time of the night?” she laughed. Half asleep and wrapped in multiple layers of robes, she picked up an Ichi-qizil melon, cut samples for us and posed for a photo. She was flattered that of all the melons we had seen in Uzbekistan, we had selected hers.
In the closing hours of my quest, I realized that over the 681 years since Ibn Battuta’s visit to Khorezm, Uzbek farmers had been hard at work perfecting the art of melon breeding and growing. By saving old local melon seeds, creating and improving new varieties and passing down specialized horticultural practices according to regional water quality, soil types and climatic conditions, they had no doubt improved the disease resistance, shelf life, yield, texture, degree of sweetness and complexity of flavors of melons throughout the different growing areas. And then there was the issue of random variations due to natural hybridization in the melon fields to consider. With all of these factors in mind, it would not be surprising—even likely—that Ibn Battuta’s melon had evolved into something quite different, disappeared entirely, or simply fallen out of favor because other, more recent varieties were better.
Standing in the cold night air, one thing was clear: Ichi-qizil was as close as we were going to get. I paid for the melon, and the woman thanked us. She turned off the light and climbed back into her bed. We closed the car doors and drove into the night.
Dating from the first half of the eighth century, the time of the Umayyad caliphate, about a century after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the patterns are mostly abstract, but a few use pictorial elements. Drawing from both Byzantine and Sasanian (Persian) traditions, the artists at Khirbat al-Mafjar created a new, exuberant esthetic of intricate geometric and floral motifs. Many are based on infinitely repeatable patterns, a technique that later came to be characteristic of geometric art across the Islamic world; others are based on textile arts and fresco painting.
Until recently, few of these patterns had been published. In 2010 the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage uncovered, cleaned and assessed the state of conservation of these mosaics. The floor was comprehensively photographed for the first time. A small museum opened last year, in partnership with the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.
The ruins at Khirbat al-Mafjar were discovered in 1894 and first excavated in the 1930s and ’40s by the Palestinian Department of Antiquities under Dimitri Baramki and Robert Hamilton. Baramki identified the patron of the site as Umayyad Caliph Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, who ruled from 724 until 743 ce. This elaborate complex stood for only a few years, however, until the audience hall and bath were largely ruined by an earthquake in 131 ah (748 or 749 ce). In the 1950s and ’60s, further archeological work and some restoration were carried out under Jordanian rule, but the site was abandoned under Israeli occupation from 1967 to 1994. Beginning in 1996 the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage revived conservation and archeological efforts.
In addition to the audience hall, Khirbat al-Mafjar included within its 60-hectare complex a large, two-story palace, a multi-room bath, a mosque, a monumental fountain, a perimeter wall and residences. It served as an occasional winter residence for the caliph, and it was part of an array of such palaces (qusur) throughout Syria, Jordan and Palestine that served variously as caravan stations, royal or elite residences, trading posts and security outposts. Like Khirbat al-Mafjar, many developed irrigation systems that allowed them to continue as agricultural estates.
Among its ruins, the audience hall and bath of Khirbat al-Mafjar is the best-preserved and the most striking monument. The exterior walls have 11 semicircular mosaic-tiled apses (or exedra); these half-domed structures echo the interior’s larger and higher domes supported by 16 massive piers. This structure is unique for late Byzantine and early Islamic architecture. The walls and apses were richly covered with carved stone and stucco panels—the earliest known use of stucco in the region—and there may well have been panels of glass mosaics as well.
While the earliest examples of mosaics found in the Jericho region date to the Hellenistic, early Roman and Byzantine periods, the art of mosaic flourished particularly during the Umayyad period. Some of the finest Umayyad wall mosaics, sometimes made of glass tesserae, survive in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque in Damascus. Khirbat al-Mafjar shows that the mosaic tradition continued with white mosaic paving into the subsequent Abbasid and Fatimid periods.
The entire floor of the audience hall is paved with colored mosaics. The carpets—as the floor panels are called—divide the hall into circular and rectangular spaces that appear to reflect the architectural superstructure, especially the majestic circular carpet under the central dome. It is likely that the hall served several purposes, from an audience or reception area (majlis) to a room for social events, including musical performances, to an extravagant frigidarium, or cool room, attached to the smaller heated rooms of the bath along its north wall.
Although many Umayyad mosaics are now known in the region, none surpass the mastery of art and craft at Khirbat al-Mafjar. Here, brilliant colors were woven into common motifs to fuse into a new fashion, one that was complemented by no-less-intricate wall coverings of colored stone and stucco carvings in paneled surfaces, columns and other architectural elements; above, there is evidence of painted frescos on upper floors.
When photography, film and conservation studies of the floor were completed, the mosaics were covered with Geotextile and sand for conservation until a permanent, protective shelter can be built over them. Meanwhile, excavations and research continue at other places in the Khirbat al-Mafjar complex. It is hoped that with suitable protection and conservation, the mosaics may one day be uncovered for public viewing, making Khirbat al-Mafjar a prime destination for tourists and historians.
www.jerichomafjarproject.org
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Rabi` i 1437–rabi` ii
Above: This semicircular apse on the east end of the audience hall’s north wall measures about 4½ meters in diameter—the same as the hall’s 10 other apses, which together present one of the hall’s most distinctive architectural features. Each apse is tiled in a unique mosaic pattern: Here, a simple, flat floral pattern, bordered with multicolored diamonds, appears kin to Palestinian textile embroidery motifs that endure today. In front of the apse, the tightly interwoven, curvilinear “runner” uses multiple colors to give the elements in its pattern shape and depth. Along the partially restored back wall, six niches were likely filled with statuary; six of the 10 other apses show similar niches.
Rabi` ii–Jumada i
Above: Interaction among smooth curves, static squares, hub-like circles and lines that intertwine among them like thorny vines gives this detail of floor Panel 8, in the west-central part of the hall, an almost living tension. The intricacy of this and other patterns in the hall pushed the boundaries of the mosaic artist’s ability to render complex symmetry with precision; as a result, the slight deviations from mathematical perfection tend to reinforce the organic effect.
Jumada i–Jumada ii
Above: Facing east to what was once a grand entryway some 30 meters at the other end of the audience hall’s main axial nave, the design of what has been designated Apse v is the most complex and visually prominent of the 11 apse mosaics. It shows one of only two purely representational images in the hall’s mosaic floor: a central panel with a sprout, ethrog (citron) and knife—a motif common at the time also in Christian and Jewish structures. The radial, basket-like motif, shown here in the foreground, visually links the apse to the much larger, central basket motif under the main dome.
Jumada ii–Rajab
Above: The “basket-weave mosaic” at the center of the hall is one of the most complex and visually hypnotic pattern designs known from the period. Each of its tessera is the same size, and the artisans produced their effect by gradually increasing the number of tesserae in each design element. At the center is a circular marble drain cover.
Rajab–Sha`aban
Above: In this detail photo, Panel 15, located in the northeast quadrant of the hall, shows a vibrant, four-point pattern of squares, crosses and octagons whose hard lines are softened by thin, flower-like bands. The effect resembles embroidery and other textile patterns; its structure is a four-point pattern of tessellation that would in later centuries be developed in greater complexity in homes, palaces, mosques and madrassahs (schools) throughout the Islamic world.
Sha`aban–Ramadan
Above: This pattern appears on both the east and the west sides of the hall’s center: a design of tessellated squares, each with 24 nearly semicircular petals, each petal inset with a small flower, which produces a bouquet effect. The precision of the geometry is such that the main diagonal lines, which originate at the outer corners and meet at the edge of the circular ribbon band, form a perfect isosceles triangle.
Ramadan–Shawwal
Above: Sunlight illuminates color that remains vivid in the tesserae that create this sharply zigzag pattern in Apse vii. Each mosaic piece, or tessera, measures between 13 and 16 millimeters, and most are cuboid in shape. Binding and setting the mosaic floor originally was an underlayer of compacted limestone mortar that itself lay on top of nearly a meter of three further foundation layers of ash, lime, pebbles, sand and earth mixed with rubble and shards.
Shawwal–Dhu al-Qa`dah
Above: Three rings of tightly interwoven circles comprise the design of circular Panel 3, one of four such circular designs that lie at the centers of the four corner quadrants of the hall. Here, a set of large circles is inset with a ring of smaller circles of two alternating sizes; below it, an inner ring of circles surrounds and grows out of an eight-pointed star visible in the inset.
Dhu-al-Qa`dah – Dhu-al-Hijjah
Above: One of the best-preserved mosaics lies in the diwan, a small sitting room that was entered on the northwest corner of the hall. Its mosaic design is clearly intended to resemble, if not imitate, a carpet—it even has tassels on the corners. Its diamond-pattern field is bordered by inner and outer decorative bands, much as a carpet would be; the raised seats show a further mosaic band.
Dhu-al-Hijjah–Muharram 1438
Above: A corner detail of the circular medallion in Panel 5, in the southeast corner, shows its best-preserved section. The scalloped shell pattern is unique among the hall’s designs, and unusual also for showing seven elements rather than four, six or a multiple of those numbers.
Safar–Rabi` i
Above: One of the most visually striking of all the apse panels is the electrically high-contrast, four-point pattern of Apse viii . Its seemingly premature ending, at the edge of the interwoven pattern of the floor runner mosaic of Panel 29, which adjoins on its other side the textile-like pattern of Panel 27, highlights the eclecticism of the hall’s mosaic art.
Rabi` i–Rabi` ii
Above: Although the audience hall mosaics can be interpreted both as echoes of the past and harbingers of the geometric patterns that in later centuries became associated with the highest expressions of art in Islamic lands, one of the finest mosaics at Khirbat al-Mafjar is pictorial: The Tree of Life, which lies in an apse at the focus of the diwan. The motif harkens back to Roman and Byzantine examples, but was here executed with unique mastery. It shows a lushly fruited tree, under which two gazelles graze peacefully—a common motif in mosaics and frescoes throughout the region and southwest into Egypt—while on the right, a lion attacks a fleeing gazelle. “The composition and technical perfection of this mosaic, its range of coloring, and the intensity of its scene make this carpet the chief wonder of the arts at Khibat al-Mafjar,” wrote Taha and Whitcomb.