Excerpt from Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir: A Study in Early Mohanmadan Architecture
I have attempted in this book to bring together the materials, so far as they are known, which bear upon the earliest phases of Mohammedan architecture, to consider the circumstances under which it arose and the roots from which it sprang. No development of civilization, or of the arts which serve and adorn civilization, has burst full-fledged from the forehead of the god ; and architecture, which is the first and most permanent of the arts, reflects with singular fidelity the history of its creators. Not only does their culture stand revealed in the crumbling walls which sheltered them and in the monuments raised for perpetual remembrance over their bones, but the links which bound them to that which had gone before arc therein confessed, as well as their own contribution to the achievements of their predecessors, to mechanical skilfulness, to utility, and to beauty. It is the nature and the extent of this contribution which is of vital importance to the student, and it is this which lends to architecture its keenest significance. What, then, was the contribution of the first builders of Islam ?
It must be confessed that the question admits of no very striking rejoinder The Mohammedan invaders were essentially nomadic ; their dwelling was the black tent, their grave the desert sands. The inhabitants of the rare oases of western and central Arabia were content, as they are to-day. with a rude architecture of sun-dried brick and palm-trunks, unadorned by any intricate device of the imagination, and unsuited to any but the simplest needs. Even the great national shrine at Mecca, the sacred house of the Ka'bah, was innocent of subsidiary constructions. It is true that on the northern trade-route the rock-cut tombs of Madain Salih and of Petra bear witness to a higher order of artistic impulse, but it was an impulse which borrowed its power from without, from Hellenized Egypt and from Hellenized Syria. If there were an indigenous Arabian architecture worthy of the name, it can only have existed in the southern limits of the peninsula, where as yet exploration has been too imperfect to afford data for argument, nor is there evidence to show that in the seventh century of our era it can have played a part in the development of the northern tribes. Upon the northern frontiers the influence of the Byzantine and of the Sasanian empires would seem to have been predominant, and when the invaders established themselves in provinces which had been ruled from Constantinople or from Ctesiphon, they employed Greek and Persian artificers to fulfil their newly developed requirements and to satisfy their newly dcvelo|>ed taste for architectural magnificence.
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