The residences of Muslim rulers-the havens of their temporary, earthly life-were significantly inferior in strength of building materials to mausoleums - "houses of eternity". Symbols of power, often forcibly taken away from their predecessors, palaces were obviously doomed to destruction. Unlike religious buildings, the monuments of palace architecture of the first centuries of Islam either disappeared without a trace or were found in a state that makes it difficult to identify them. Only a few structures have been preserved enough to allow archaeologists and art historians to recreate the appearance of the destroyed buildings and get an idea of their typical forms and prototypes. The descriptions of palaces and court life left by Arab and Persian medieval authors help restore the ruins ' architectural image. Clarification of the features of the early Muslim palace will allow us to assess the adequacy of its definition as a specific type of Islamic architecture and as an integral component in the overall picture of the formation and development of the Caliphate's culture.

One of the main features of the formation of Islamic culture was the conscious assimilation and extensive use of the experience of previous civilizations, the desire to learn and adapt it. In other words, in the process of building their own civilization, Muslim Arabs were guided by the principle of continuity, figuratively expressed by the Arabic proverb: "Knowledge is a city: one of its gates is memory, the other is understanding "(Pedersen, 2003, p. 1130). A study of literary sources and archaeologically researched monuments 1 shows that early Muslim rulers were particularly willing to follow this principle in creating their residences, which reflected the stages of conquering the conquered lands and developing their cultural past. Monuments of Arabic and Persian literature show that in the IX-X centuries the memory of the famous old palaces was still alive, the engineering merits and magnificent decoration of which admired Muslims and probably inspired Islamic architects.

Among the prototypes of Islamic palace structures, the most famous was the Aiwan of Kisra (the Palace of Khosrow), or Tak-i Kisra (the Arch of Khosrow) - the famous Sassanid residence 2 in Ctesiphon 3, which medieval authors often cite as an example of rare craftsmanship and high taste. Ibn Khordadbeh, 4 who probably saw the building still well preserved, claimed "that there is no structure made of plaster

1 Many Russian and foreign archaeologists and art historians studied the architecture of early Muslim palaces, including: G. A. Pugachenkova, S. G. Khmelnitsky, E. Herzfeld, K. Creswell, J. Sauvage, D. Schlumberger, N. Eliseev, O. Grabar.

2 Sasanids-a dynasty of Iranian kings (224-651).

3 Ctesiphon, Arabic: al-Madain is an ancient city on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, 35 km below Baghdad.

4 Ibn Khordadbeh (Abu'l-Qasim Ubaydallah ibn Abdallah ibn Khordadbeh), an Arab geographer and traveler, author of the Book of Ways and Countries, wrote around 885.

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(knocking) and bricks are more beautiful than Aiwan Kisra in al-Madain "(Ibn Khordadbeh, 1986, p. 139).

Judging by the enthusiastic response of al-Bukhturi 5, the Ctesiphon Palace could serve as one of the standards of a Muslim medieval architect of a government building, intended, like ancient Eastern palaces, both for housing, for receptions, and for administrative needs. As shown by the excavations of the German archaeological expedition [Reutner, 1930, Reutner, 1933], the Shah's palace was built according to the ancient Mesopotamian tradition inside the royal quarter. In the collective memory of Iranians and Arabs, this magnificent structure is associated with the legendary image of the Sasanian king Khosrow, 6 who is credited with erecting the most grand and magnificent part of the palace - the vaulted ivan7, opened to the facade by a huge arch. Overwhelming in its grandeur and size, Ivan served as a royal audience hall; here was the throne of the king, and solemn receptions were held. The arch of Ivan, 37 m high and 27 m wide, broke through the center of the monumental multi-tiered facade with a powerful wave, the northern wing of which collapsed on April 15, 1887 due to the unprecedented Tiger flood[Iraq...,1966, p. 12]. In old photographs and engravings, the arch looks like a decorative bridge connecting the right and left wings. The arch of Ivan was decorated with glass mosaics, and the lower walls were lined with marble [Iskusstvo..., 1965, p. 98]. The floor of the hall was almost completely covered with a colossal carpet (with a total area of more than 900 m2), woven with gold, silver, precious stones and pearls [Bolshakov, 1993, p. 66].

No less popular in Arabic literature was the legendary image of the Gumdan Castle in Sana'a that actually existed in the II-VII centuries. In the description of al-Hamdani 8, this vanished example of ancient Yemeni architecture appears as an unattainable ideal of a medieval architect: "After Gumdan the exalted and its inhabitants! The thought of him calms the heart! It reached up to the middle of the heavens, towering at least twenty stories high! The clouds have crowned it with a turban, and it is girded and clothed with marble; its blocks are joined with brass, and onyx and alabaster are between its towers. At each corner of it is the head of a flying eagle or the head of a lion of brass, roaring. In the back of it, a drip clock is securely located, dripping to count the parts of the day. Flocks of birds stop there to rest, and the water in its channels [flows] from a spring, the water of which is not too cold. At the top of it, above all this, is a marble-paved upper room..."[cit. by: Piotrovsky, 1985, p. 182].

Despite the pathetic exaggeration, the description of Gumdan Castle coincides with the appearance of traditional tower-like houses in modern Yemen in Al-Mahwit, Jibla, and Sana'a [Tourist..., 1984, p. 33, 36, 40] and combines features that generally corresponded to the medieval Muslim ideal of a representative architectural structure. According to Ibn Jubayr 9, the same technique of fastening masonry with metal, but not copper, but lead, was used in the creation of columns of Large Mosques 10 in Kufa (670s) and Medina (707-709) [Ibn Jubayr, 1984,

5 Al-Bukhturi, a ninth-century Syrian poet, according to Ibn Khordadbeh, wrote about the Taq - i Kisra Palace: "It is like a palace of wonders of art... It is not known whether this was done by humans for the jinn to live there, or by the jinn for humans "(Ibn Khordadbeh, 1986, p. 139).

6 Khosrow (Khustrau) I Anushirvan-king of Iran (531-579), in Arabic and Persian historiography, poetry and literature - an example of an ideal monarch; Khosroi of Arabic sources-a synonym for the Persian king.

7 Aiwan (Persian) - 1) a hall without a front wall, covered with a vault or ceiling on columns or pillars; 2) a palace (mainly in Arabic and Persian medieval authors), usually in the sense of a royal residence or official government building; 3) a platform-like elevation in the back of the hall or courtyard.

8 Al-Hamdani (al-Hasan ibn Ahmad al-Hamdani) - South Arabian historian and geographer (d. 945).

9 Ibn Jubayr (Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Jubayr) - Andalusian traveler (1145-1217).

10 Grand Mosque (Arabic) - Jami al-Kabir) - the main or only cathedral mosque of the city, in Medina-the Mosque of the Prophet.

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p. 134, 148]. The art of facing with marble and colored stone, later called ablak11, was well known to the creators of the first monumental building of Islam - the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (687-691) and the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina (Ibn Jubayr, 1984, p.135).

Bronze (rarely stone or ceramic) eagles or lions, along with roosters, peacocks, deer or other figures, formed a specific type of Muslim palace art; in gardens and pavilions, they decorated water cannons of fountains, served as aquarius or incense burners [see fig.: Piotrovsky, 2001, pp. 70, 76, 78; Islam..., 2000, S. 202, 239]. Water clocks, the idea of which the Arabs adopted from the Persians and Byzantines, were, for example, the Abbasid Caliph Harun ar-Rashid (786 - 809) [Pipunyrov, 1982, p. 87-96], in the XII century. complicated, they received the form of a ceremonial palace facade with an arch and moving figures; a sample of such clocks was located in the center of the city. in the Umayyad Grand Mosque in Damascus (Ibn Jubayr, 1984, pp. 192-193). Water flowing in gutters, pouring from fountains, filling swimming pools, was an indispensable component of any Muslim residential and religious building. Thus, in the story of al-Hamdani, a collective image appears not so much of a pre-Islamic structure, but of an Arab castle-palace, which included the characteristics of the type of buildings that had developed by his time (X century).

The images of Muslim palace architecture that deserve the researcher's attention are presented in the fairy tales of the "Thousand and One Nights", which have absorbed the artistic experience of several centuries and the vast Arab-Iranian region12. One of the fairy tales describes "a palace built of black stone and lined with iron." Its double gates led to the portico, and from there to the palace chambers, decorated with "silk and starry carpets" and curtains that were lowered (a sign of a hidden presence). And in the middle of the palace there was a courtyard with four raised platforms (aivans), one facing the other, and a stone bench, and a fountain with a reservoir, over which were four lions of red gold, spouting water from their mouths like pearls and yakhonty, and birds flew around the palace, and over the palace there was a golden net that prevented them from going up"[Thousand..., 1929, vol. 1, pp. 91-92].

If you ignore the fabulous additions, which are very moderate here, it is not difficult to imagine a real structure - a typical Arab Qasr, or castle-palace. The gates of the palace, surrounded by a blank wall, led to the entrance complex, which included the front courtyard, portico, vestibule and corridors; they protected from direct entry of outsiders to the heart of the building-the main halls oriented towards the central courtyard with four iwans on the axes and a reservoir in the middle; living quarters were adjacent to the halls or were hidden behind them. The prototype of such a composition is found in the Parthian temple-palace discovered by archaeologists in Ashur (I century BC-I century AD; Iraq).: the only entrance led to a system of narrow bypass corridors connecting and separating groups of rooms organized around several courtyards (Schlumberger, 1985, p. 104). The same design principle was also used by Assyrian builders, as evidenced by studies of palaces of the 9th century BC in Dur-Sharrukin and Til-Barsib (Flitner, 1958, pp. 258-259). Essentially new, and precisely Parthian, in the opinion of D'Artagnan. Schlumberger's invention was the introduction to the architecture of Ashur of a courtyard with four vaulted iwans with large semicircles.-

Ablaq 11 (Arabic) - motley) - type and technique of architectural decoration (mainly in Syria and Egypt) by laying out or lining wall surfaces with strips of polished colored stone.

12 For the intended place and time of creation of the collection, see the introductory article by M. A. Salye: [Thousand..., vol. 1, 1929, pp. XLII-XLIV].

13 Compositions with star medallions are typical for traditional carpets of Azerbaijan and Turkey.

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1. Umayyad Palace in Amman. Ceremonial building. The first half of the VIII century. Reconstruction: a section with a supposed dome (Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 380).

two arches (Schlumberger, 1985, p. 161); each arch in the center of the three-tiered facade created a composition that was later brought to a grand scale in Ctesiphon.

The ensemble of several square courtyards built into a rectangle of common external walls can be reconstructed from the layout and remains of the Umayyad palace, which in the first half of the VIII century occupied the territory of the ancient citadel of Amman (Jordan) that dominates the city. The Ivan composition in this case was used for a ceremonial building, which is believed to have opened a solemn approach to the throne complex [Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 379-381, 572]. Built of blocks of stone, the building is a cross-shaped composition of four vaulted aivans inscribed in a square, open to the chamber courtyard with beautiful, slightly pointed arches. The walls inside and on the courtyard facades of the aivans are surrounded to half the height by a belt of slender niches decorated with carved arabesques with arches on columns resting on the plinth. The upper half of the walls at the junction of the aivans is occupied by similar to the lower, but large flat arches filled with ornamental stone carvings. The sails have not been preserved, but the upper masonry suggests that the arches of the ivans were hidden under the flat roof that unites the building, and the courtyard either remained open or had a dome built using corner tromps (Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 380). Two aiwans facing each other on the main axis of the ensemble are through, which gives reason to consider this representative and obviously non-residential structure as a front courtyard, forming a solemn ceremonial entrance to the caliph's residence.

A study of the ruins of the Amman Citadel showed that the Umayyad palace builders used not only the Parthian-Sasanian idea of a four-bay composition, but also the ancient Mesopotamian tradition of designing a palace ensemble as several groups of buildings enclosed in a common fence and organized each around its own courtyard (Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 378).

Returning to the description of the fairy-tale castle, we note that it is based on the principle of building a building both along the perimeter and along the coordinate axes, with the allocation of open internal space. Universal for the architecture of the Muslim world, this principle was applied by the Romans in the buildings built on the eastern gra-

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small forts 14, whose planning and construction techniques in the 7th-8th centuries were continued in the creationribats15 and "desert castles" - fortified residences or estates of Umayyad caliphs and princes, discovered (some unfinished) in Jordan, Palestine and Syria far from populated areas.

The figurative name - "desert castles" - reflected the romantic idea of their discoverers that the Umayyads, natives of Western Arabia, sought conditions close to the way of life of the Arabian nomads, for which they left the cities and built their palaces in waterless areas, on the edge of the desert. anecdotes, including the words of a Bedouin poet of the eighth century, addressed to Caliph al-Walid: "The proximity of springs is not good for us; mosquitoes and fever destroy us" (Creswell, 1958, p. 94). The reasons for the construction of "desert castles" again became a mystery when archaeological evidence was found that in some cases the areas in which caliphs and princes founded their residences were at that time long-standing oases with a developed irrigation system, blooming and fruit-bearing gardens and rich land, and the "castles" themselves were sometimes endowed with the functions of agricultural estates which could play an important role in the economic life of the region [Grabar, 1973, p. 32; Islam..., 2000, p. 72]. Similar and at the same time different, these monuments allow us to understand how ideas about the type of residence of the Muslim ruler were formed in the Caliphate.

One of the earliest and only well - preserved "desert castle" - Qusayr Amra (Small Amra Palace) was discovered about 100 km east of Amman in 1898 by the Austrian archaeologist A. Musel. After the first publication of the monument in 1907 [Musil et al., 1907], alternative assumptions were made: about the late Antique origin, that it was the residence of the Ghassanids, 16 about its belonging to the Abbasid era, and, finally, about its connection with the Umayyad era, 17 which was confirmed by an analysis of the epigraphy [Creswell, 1958, p. 91-93; Grabar, 1986, p. 131]. For a long time, Qusayr Amr was taken for the pleasure "hunting lodge" of al-Walid I 18. Research by the Spanish Archaeological Mission of 1971-1974 showed that the "lodge", which, according to archaeologists, was a reception hall of the palace with an adjacent bathhouse, was part of a rather extensive ensemble of a country residence, built, apparently, in the 710s. 300 m to the north-west of the palace-the baths found the remains of a small castle with a perimeter building on the sides of the courtyard (according to archaeologists, it was intended for the retinue and servants of the Caliph), and to the east - the remains of a hydraulic complex with a water intake wheel, a well and cisterns. Partially preserved and observation tower, from which you can clearly see the surrounding plain area of the residence. The entire ensemble was surrounded by a low but wide wall, probably designed to contain silt that settles after short floods of a drying river; silty deposits could well support the life of an orchard [Almargo et al., 1975, p. 117-121].

14 A line of such forts stretched from the Gulf of Aqaba to Damascus and from Damascus to Palmyra; chroniclers report that sometimes Umayyad caliphs used such forts as their residences (Creswell, 1958, p. 94).

Ribat 15 (Arabic), an early medieval monastery of Muslim warriors, defenders of the faith and the state.

16 The Ghassanids were vassal Arab princes of Byzantium; in the sixth century they controlled territories from the Euphrates to the Gulf of Aqaba; they professed Christianity [Bolshakov, 1989, p. 14].

17 A discussion on attribution and dating of Qusayr Amra is given by E. Herzfeld (1910, p. 106).

18 Al-Walid I, Umayyad Caliph (705-715).

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Standing alone now in the middle of the barren steppe, facing the entrance facade to the modern road, the low building of the palace-bathhouse, thanks to its clearly drawn sculptural volume with semicircles of arches, apses and a low domed extension, can be distinguished from a greater distance. It is composed of large hewn blocks of local limestone of a warm reddish hue. The interior of the hall, covered from top to bottom with frescoes, is divided by two powerful longitudinal arches into three aisles of equal height and width. Each nave is covered by the same cylindrical vault, decorated with paintings that roughly imitate caissons. In the center of the south side, opposite the entrance to the hall, a deep niche is opened under a box vault, flanked by two small vaulted rooms completed with semicircular apses of unclear purpose. Decorated with the image of the monarch sitting under a canopy surrounded by two servants with fans, the niche presumably served as a throne room, and two small rooms, which are accessed by doors in the side walls of the niche-bedrooms [Almargo et al., 1975, p. 118] 19. The first researchers still saw in these rooms floors with a stylized leaf pattern laid out with glass mosaics (Creswell, 1958, p. 86). In the east wall of the hall, a low doorway connects the hall with the baths located on the lower level. The composition of the alternating " warm "and two" hot " steam rooms follows the ancient tradition, as well as the subjects of the murals decorating them. On the wall of the "women's" steam room with a low cross vault is a scene of bathing women and children. Another " hot " room with two baths sunk into the floor is covered by a hemispherical dome, on which the celestial sphere and zodiac signs are depicted. In the service room isolated from the baths, there was a tank for heating water.

The decorative decoration of the interior gave this building a simple, brutal, expressive architecture of a truly palatial character. Judging by the remains found, the floors of the rooms were laid out with mosaics, the walls were lined with marble at half the height (in both cases, the Syro-Palestinian early Byzantine tradition is visible). The upper part of the walls and ceilings were completely covered with paintings (a technique more typical of Coptic art), extremely diverse both in subjects and in the manner of execution. Scenes of bathing, entertainment, hunting, competitions, images of the monarch, conquered kings, dancers, working artisans, mythological characters, animals are woven into a fascinating pictorial story, sometimes surprisingly and embarrassingly free, far from fully understood and deciphered. The style of some murals demonstrates the familiarity of their creators with the art of Christian Egypt [Almargo et al, 1975, pl. XXXIII-XXXV], others are focused on the ideals of antiquity [Almargo et al., 1975, pl. XXI, XXII, XLII], and still others prefer the heritage of the Syro-Palestinian school of painting of the IV-VI centuries. [Almargo et al, 1975, pl. XII, XIII], known mainly for floor mosaics 20. Some characters in clothing, facial features, and drawing patterns vaguely resemble images of early medieval palace paintings in Central Asia (Almargo et al., 1975, pl. V, XIX).

Regardless of whether Qusayr Amr was actually a palace with a bathhouse, or baths with a reception hall in the ensemble of the estate, this monument clearly shows that at the beginning of the VIII century. builders and designers of the palaces of the Caliphs not only used the engineering and artistic experience of the late Antique Eastern Mediterranean, but probably were themselves carriers of this experience. It should be noted that neither

19 This assumption seems doubtful due to the small size of the rooms and the lack of windows in them. K. Creswell believed that these small rooms were rest rooms that were lit through open doors [Creswell, 1958, p. 86], but these doors are too small and open into a windowless niche.

20 For the stylistic characteristics, genesis, and historical and artistic significance of Qusayr Amra murals, see Ettinghausen, 1962, p. 30; Grabar, 1988, p. 75-83.

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2. Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi. 727/28 AD Reconstruction [Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 387].

There is nothing in the architecture or decoration of Qusayr Amra that connects this monument with Islam.

A representative program, however, has already been outlined, both in the organization of the interior space and in the decoration. The throne room was placed at the back of the hall, on the central axis, and highlighted, in addition to the image of the monarch, with a picturesque imitation of hanging draperies - a sign of the highest presence: according to etiquette, the curtains were supposed to hide the lord of the faithful from visitors. The organization of the interior of the Qusayr Amra reception hall is quite consistent with the reconstructed scene of the Umayyad palace audience by J. Sauvage based on sources: "In the reception hall, the Caliph sat at the end and on the longitudinal axis of the room (fi Sadr al-Majlis), facing the main entrance... on a bed (sarir), next to which incense was burned in incense bowls. He held a staff (qadib), no doubt originally identified with the staff with which the earliest Arabs never parted.. but which soon acquired the meaning of a real scepter. There was a curtain hanging in front of him" (Sauvaget, 1947, p. 131). Communication between the Caliph and the visitor took place through a lowered curtain, as evidenced by the example quoted by Sauvaget: a visitor who was shown into the reception hall "saw a curtain hanging and a seat for one person. Hajib [the master of ceremonies] said to him, " Ma'bad, greet the Commander of the faithful... and al-Walid, from behind the curtain, returned his greeting" " (Sauvaget, 1947, p. 131).

To reconstruct the image of an early Muslim palace, rich material was provided by the excavations of Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi-the Western Palace of al-Khair 21, discovered on the edge of the Syrian desert, on a small hill, 60 km to the southwest

21 Scientific excavations of the castle were carried out by D. Schlumberger in 1936-1938 (Schlumberger, 1939). It became known as the Western one after the discovery of another "desert castle" almost 100 km northeast of Palmyra-Qasr al - Khair al-Sharqi (Eastern), a fortified Umayyad residence city with a castle or caravanserai attached to it.

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from ancient Palmyra. The palace was part of a large estate created by the Umayyads in an oasis that owed its prosperity to a dam built in the first century by the Romans. The estate included agricultural land, a large fruit orchard-bustan, a reservoir-birka', a watermill, a khan (caravanserai) with a mosque, a hammam (baths) dating back to Roman-Byzantine times; in one of its rooms there was a prayer room with a mihrab. A system of underground and surface canals irrigated and supplied the estate with water coming from a large artificial lake (1500 x 800 m) [Elisseeff, 2003, p. 726]. On the architrave of the caravanserai gate, which was moved to the National Museum in Damascus, there is a construction inscription with the date of construction and the name of the" lord of the faithful " - the Umayyad Caliph Abdallah Hisham (724-743), who "ordered this work to be done in fulfillment of the will of God... under the direction of Thabit bin Abi Thabit in Rajab of the year 109 (October-November 727) " 22. Apparently, the entire ensemble was created around this time.

The Qasr proper was erected on the site of the Yakovite monastery, 23 founded in 559 by the Ghassanid philarch. The design of the square walls included a tower preserved from the monastery with a hinged loophole-a balcony over the entrance, which Creswell considered one of the first examples of mashikuli [Creswell, 1958, p. 121].

The Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi structure is a classic example of a symmetrical perimeter-axial building 24. An almost regular square of blank walls (approximately 70 x 70 m), precisely oriented along the coordinate axes, is reinforced from the outside at the corners with three-quarter blind buttresses, and in the center of each facade with semicircular blind buttresses (with the exception of the rectangular monastery tower attached to the northern corner). The only entrance in the center of the eastern wall leads to a paved corridor covered with a cylindrical vault-a vestibule 11 m long, with benches on each side. Inside, the palace is built in two floors along the sides of a square (37 x 37 m) paved courtyard, surrounded by porticos on columns with Corinthian capitals and bases of Doric capitals, apparently borrowed from some ancient building; at the corners, instead of columns, square pillars are placed; in the center of the courtyard is a small pool. The first floor, divided into six complexes of rooms-byatoe, was connected by two staircases to the second floor, which generally follows the layout of the first floor and is enclosed from the courtyard space by a bypass gallery on a low colonnade with balustrades. The rooms had no windows and were illuminated from the courtyard side through arched doorways with tympanums decorated with ornamental lattices made of cast knocking.

Compositional and planning features, according to Creswell, were taken up by the builders of Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi (they were masters from the Syrian city of Homs) from the palace of the Roman governor of Bosra in southern Syria (Creswell, 1969, pt. II, p. 506-521). In the future, these features determined the character of not only Umayyad, but in general Islamic palace, residential and civil architecture, influencing the formation of types of hotel, educational and hospital buildings and Sufi monasteries.

However, Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi, which proclaims the classical type of Umayyad castle-palace with its layout and composition, raises questions about some unexpected methods of construction and decorative design for the place and time of its creation. Contrary to the Syrian tradition of stone architecture, the palace, built on a limestone foundation, was mostly built of mud bricks [Elisseeff, 2003, 726b] . P. Hillenbrand saw this as a conscious appeal to the " per-

22 The translation from Arabic was made by the author according to the inscription in the National Museum of Damascus.

23 Jacobites-representatives of the Syrian branch of the Monophysites, followers of the Syrian monk, then Bishop of Edessa Jacob Baradei (d. 578).

24 For the Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi plan, see [Grabar, 1973, II, 61], for reconstruction, see [Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 387].

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research practice" [Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 390]. In addition, Qasr, seemingly endowed with defensive functions, received a one-of-a-kind decorative portal, clearly devoid of defensive capabilities. The semicircular towers-abutments of portal 25, crowned with figured carved merlons, are surrounded by tiers of ornamental reliefs made of painted knock, and the wall above the door is decorated with an arch depicting a gallery-balcony with a double window open to it.

No less surprising are the two frescoes 26 that decorated not the walls, as one might expect, but the floors of two identical rectangular rooms located symmetrically on either side of the entrance to the qasr. These rooms were the lower level of stairwells, which does not explain why, instead of the floor mosaics so common in Syria and Palestine, the floors were covered with imitating mosaic compositions with paintings that were clearly not intended for walking on them. Both frescoes, fortunately, are relatively well preserved. One of them, which includes a breast "portrait" of a girl or young man with a snake wrapped around her neck and a handkerchief filled with fruit in her hands, resembles provincial examples of late Antique painting; the other, with the image of two musicians at the top and an Umayyad horseman in the center (the composition of the lower, third tier is almost erased), is closer to works of Iranian art, it was noted by R. Ettinghausen, 1962, pp. 34-37. However, in comparison with the different styles of Qusayr Amra's murals, the style structure of Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi castle, which has manifested itself in a variety of ways not only in these two frescoes, but also in fragments of wall paintings that are closer to Central Asian samples, in plant-geometric ornaments and sculptures made of knock (fragmentary gru-

25 The Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi portal now forms the entrance to the National Museum in Damascus.

26 Both frescoes, as well as the remains of wall paintings found in the ruins of the palace, ornamental window grilles and reliefs, rough fragmentary sculptures of the Caliph on a throne or on a horse (all made of knocking) are now displayed in the halls of the National Museum in Damascus.

стр. 31

бовато-плоскостные, стаффажные горельефы халифа на троне, на коне; пластический, выразительного рисунка рельеф крадущейся львицы), не выходит за рамки той художественной культуры, которая складывалась в Сирии в эпоху Омейядов.

A striking example of the heterogeneity and compilability of this culture is Mshatta, the Arabic al-Mushatta, 27 discovered in 1865 in the desert 35 km south of Amman by the English traveler G. Layard, who included a brief description of it in his travel notes [Layard, 1887, I, p. 1145]. This unfinished monument gave researchers a lot of trouble. It is believed that the Arabic name al-Mushatta comes from a word meaning a place where they spend the winter, or a winter camp [Soucek, 2003, p. 676a]. E. Herzfeld called Mshatta "one of the most controversial monuments of Eastern architecture" and in his famous article [Herzfeld, 1910, p. 105] noted that in solving the problem of the historical site of this structure, five hypotheses were expressed. According to these hypotheses, Mshatta could have been built either by the Sassanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, the Ghassanids, or the Umayyads. Later archaeological discoveries and research have established that this unfinished "desert castle" was founded by the Umayyad Caliph Hisham (724-743) in the last year of his life and abandoned shortly after his death.29

The regular symmetrical plan of the Mshatta inscribed in a regular square (Creswell, 1958, p. 125; Grabar, 1973, II, 62) is read as a developed Umayyad Qasr, in which the idea of a royal castle-palace should have been perfectly embodied. Judging by the architecture and decor, the caliph intended Mshatta as an ideal government residence, corresponding to the status of a great empire, which by this time had become the Caliphate. The large palace complex, oriented along the coordinate axes, was designed in such a way that its main, official part unfolded along the central axis from south to north with a spectacular change of deep vaulted halls that keep cool and open to the sun courtyards.

Entering from the south, the visitor had to pass through a suite of entrance rooms into a spacious central courtyard, on the opposite side of which he was met by a ceremoniously decorated three-arched ivan leading to the throne room. Thus, the idea laid down in the layout of the Qusayr Amra reception hall has received a full-fledged architectural development here. The throne complex was flanked by the palace's living quarters. It is characteristic that the mosque in Mshatta is separated from the main ensemble and adjoins the entrance complex on the south side, to the right of the entrance.

The walls of the Mshatta, encircling a square area and reinforced at the corners with monolithic towers that were almost circular in plan, had not one but five semicircular towers on each side (144 m long); three of them were located in the government and residential areas, and the fourth at the entrance, next to the mosque, served as toilets. The main building material of Mshatta was brick, although the outer walls, which remained at a height of three to five and a half meters, were made of stone. The interiors were decorated with stone covered with ornamental carvings and imported marble columns. The only entrance to the castle, which opens the southern facade of the castle exactly in the middle and marks the beginning of its central axis, is flanked by two towers in the shape of a half octahedron, decorated with a stone-carved uni-

27 The ruins of Mshatta were discovered in 1865 by Sir Henry Layard and described together with other monuments he saw in his travel notes [Layard, 1887, I, p. 1145]. For archaeological studies of Mshatta, see [Soucek, 2003, p. 676a].

28 Lakhmids - Arab princes whose power extended from the Nefrud desert to the borders of Byzantium; vassals of the Sassanids; Nestorian Christians [Bolshakov, 1989, p. 24].

29 reason for revising the dating was a brick found in Mshatta in June 1964 with an Arabic inscription, which turned out to be an outline of a letter from one of the highest-ranking officials who served under the caliphs Hisham, al - Walid II and Yazid III [Islam..., S. 77-78].

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k with a two-level sculptural frieze relief. The faces of these blind buttress towers and adjacent sections of the wall are divided by a high carved border laid in a zigzag pattern into triangles, in the field of which ornamental rosettes and/or images of real and fabulous animals and birds, built in a heraldic composition, are sculpturally highlighted against the background of weaves erupting from vases and violently blooming vines 30.

Thus, the facade of Mshatta, which does not look like the Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi portal, essentially develops the same idea of an elegantly decorated grand monumental entrance to the government residence. However, if in the latter case the decor of the portal can be considered as an indisputable early example of the emerging new Islamic aesthetics with its dominant abstract ornament, then the carved stone frieze of Mshatta still uses the artistic language of late antiquity with the concreteness of pictorial forms inherent in this language. It is this circumstance that has long been the reason for the priority for a number of researchers of the early (up to Roman time) dating of Mshatta.

The latest known Umayyad qasr, Khirbat al-Mafjar 31, located 3 km north of Jericho, if completed, would combine all the main features of the "desert castles", as well as the problems associated with their research. Like Qasr al-Khair al-Gharbi, the Palestinian qasr was built on the territory of an extensive estate, the basis of which was an irrigation complex that existed in Roman times [Baer, 2003, p. 10]. Khirbat al-Mafjar is believed to have been laid out around 739 as the pleasure residence of Crown Prince al-Walid ibn Yazid, nephew of Caliph Hisham, although an inscription found on the foundation links the structure to the Caliph himself, known for his passion for construction. Al-Walid II reigned for a little over a year; in April 744, he was assassinated, leaving an unfinished residence whose unfortunate fate was sealed; the earthquake that occurred in 747/48, the completed castle would have suffered much more [Hamilton, 1969, p. 61-67; Baer, 2003, p. 16b].

The ensemble included a two-story fortified Qasr palace, a mosque and baths with underground baths, united by a portico of a rectangular courtyard with a large fountain, which repeated the shape of the Muslim shrine-the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.32 A staircase corridor allowed the prince or caliph to pass from the second floor of the palace directly to the maksura 33 mosque; other inhabitants of the castle entered it from the baths. As in Qusayr Amr, the baths occupied a separate building [Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 571]; its original architecture and decoration show the most intriguing and incomprehensible features of Umayyad art [Grabar, 1973, p.71, 75].

As in Qusayr Amr, the main part of the bathhouse was the reception hall, square in plan, with a triple semicircle of niches on each side, except for the eastern one, where the place of the middle niche was occupied by an elegant portal resembling a decorative triumphal arch. Sixteen pillars, arranged in four rows, supported the arches and arches of the two-tiered pyramid of the building, topped in the center by a beautiful dome.

30 Reconstruction of the southern facade of Mshatta is presented at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin.

31 Khirbat (ruins) al-Mafjar is the modern name of the ruins commonly known as Qasr Hisham (castle-palace of Hisham). Khirbat al-Mafjar has been known as an archaeological and architectural monument since the end of the 19th century. Excavations were carried out between 1935 and 1948. Department of Antiquities of Palestine under the leadership of R. V. Hamilton and D. S. Bamraki [Baer, 2003, pp. 10-11 a].

32 For a plan of the Khirbat al-Mafjar ensemble and reconstruction of the palace facade and fountain, see [Grabar. 1973, Ils. 60, 68, 72, 76; Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 571, figs. 7.40-7.42; p. 381, fig. 7.43].

Maksura 33 (Arabic: fenced off) - in a medieval state cathedral mosque, the area around the mihrab and minbar is separated from the prayer hall by a wooden lattice or other fence in order to protect the caliph (imam, ruler) from the crowd of worshippers.

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The floor of the hall was covered with a carpet mosaic of tesserae made of stone of different colors. Their patterns, seemingly similar to Roman and Byzantine compositions, clearly revealed such characteristic features of Islamic ornament as "fear of emptiness" (filling the background with a solid pattern), rhythmic repetition of identical or similar simple motifs that combine into a complex multi-layered pattern, and the ability to complete or continue the pattern at any point, regardless of configuration the surface to be decorated. Inside and out, the building was decorated with relief ornaments and sculptures made of painted knock-rough, heavy and archaic images of half-naked girls with baskets or bouquets of flowers and "Atlanteans" supporting the cornice; figures of goats and armed warriors.

The most elegant was the elegant little room adjoining the main hall at the western end of the north side, where the baths themselves were located, a divan with a dome on sails and a deep arched niche-an excedra, where, according to researchers, there was a throne. The ceiling of the dome was decorated with a sculptural wreath of curly heads buried in acanthus leaves, and on the spherical sails were placed reliefs of winged horses - an image common in both ancient and Iranian art. The floor of exedra still has a masterly mosaic of a tree with a mighty trunk and a broad crown laden with fruit; on one side of the trunk, fallow deer graze peacefully, on the other, a lion furiously torments a gazelle. Common in the art of ancient Iran, the scene of a predator tormenting an animal was a symbol of the equinox; onagers or gazelles nibbling at leaves or running away, turning around, -

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one of the most popular motifs of Iranian decorative compositions 34. The motif of a tree with fruit in the center of the heraldic composition is often found in Syria, Palestine and Jordan in mosaics of churches and synagogues of the V-VI centuries, but the animals are made in a pattern stylistically close to Iranian art. Thus, here, as in other monuments of the Umayyad period, we encounter a combination of diverse artistic traditions, but perhaps here it is more organic.

The Khirbat al-Mafjar ensemble can be considered as a kind of result of almost half a century of development of early Islamic palace architecture, which allows us to summarize the features that unite the early residences of the caliphs in a typologically unified group.

Most of the "desert castles" had the symmetry and regularity of a Roman military camp or border fort, which they followed in general terms. This long-noticed similarity is evident in the comparison of R. Hillenbrand's tables of plans for Roman forts and Umayyad qasrs in the Syro-Palestinian region (Hillenbrand, 2000, p. 567, 568). The use of the planning scheme of Roman fortifications, strengthening the corners and facades of the walls with three-quarter and semicircular towers (a technique that was established precisely in the architecture of the Umayyad Caliphate), as well as the only entrance protected by two bastions in the center of the main facade, would seem to convincingly prove the fortification purpose of the qasr.

Still, they weren't castles in the full sense of the word. Their walls would not have withstood an assault, and the towers, either filled with rubble and reinforcing the structure as buttresses, or (in rare cases) hollow and serving as latrines, were clearly not intended to protect the building.

According to the composition, with rare exceptions, buildings of this type were variants of a structure enclosed in a square of walls and oriented according to the countries of the world. Note that the same orientation was also typical for mosques. This arrangement of the plan seems to have made it easier to determine the sacred orientation of the Qibla, which is extremely important for a Muslim who is required to pray five times a day in any place where he is caught at prayer time. Inside, along the perimeter of the walls were located (usually in two floors) rooms opening onto a square courtyard surrounded by porticos or galleries. The construction of the palace included, if possible, everything that was supposed to provide the residence with an autonomous existence: state halls and living quarters, a mosque and a bathhouse (sometimes they were built outside), services, devices for water supply and sewerage. Special importance was attached to the allocation of the representative part of the palace-the reception hall with a throne and a solemn approach to it. The decor of the building - murals, mosaics, marble and onyx facings, carvings, stucco stucco sculptures, stone carvings-served both representative and entertaining purposes, giving the residence an impression of royal splendor and luxury.

A paradoxically typical feature of the architecture and decor of these first Muslim residences was the heterogeneity of artistic style and skill level. The combination of various, sometimes polar, artistic traditions in one monument testifies to the participation in the creation of Umayyad residences of both local and foreign craftsmen, who, due to the lack of workers, could attract people who do not have professional skills to work.

At the same time, the work of the builders and decorators of Umayyad palaces was not constrained by any strict regulations, and they did not come into conflict with the state ideological program, which the Muslim rulers only had to follow.

34 Eva Baer (Jerusalem) interprets these images as metaphors for the Caliph's power (a scene of torment) and the Caliphate's peaceful life (gazelles grazing) [Baer, 2003, p. 16b].

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I had to work it out. The attractive "freethinking" of the architecture and, especially, the decoration of the "desert castles" was a clear consequence of the fact that the Umayyads did not demand anything from the art form other than compliance with political ideas and the prestige of state power. At that time, the art that forms the life of the ruler and his family (in contrast to the art associated with the design of religious buildings) was not yet assigned a religious task.

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