File:History of mediæval art (1893) (14593448307).jpg

Identifier: historyofmedival00rebe (find matches)
Title: History of mediæval art
Year: 1893 (1890s)
Authors: Reber, Franz von, 1834-1919 Clarke, Joseph Thacher, d. 1920
Subjects: Art, Medieval
Publisher: New York : Harper & Bros.
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Public Library

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edan rites. Modern investigations, however, make it moreprobable that it was entirely built under Abd-el-Malek, A.D. 688,but by Byzantine architects and masons. (Fig. 86.) It was quitenatural that the caliphs and their emirs should employ architects ofthe eastern empire, practising the Byzantine style, in the first Chris-tian countries which they had conquered, and this is, moreover,proved to have been the case by repeated accounts of the caliphsinviting architects even from the court of the Byzantine emperors.Such an interchange is not surprising in view of the ready recogni-tion of the earlier civilization in many other ways. The adminis-trative accounts of the empire of the caliphs, for instance, wereentirely in the hands of Christian Greeks, while the masterpiecesof Greek literature, early translated into Arabic, were thoroughly 160 MOHAMMEDAN ART. studied in the schools of Bagdad, Cairo, and Cordova, at a timewhen they were almost unknown in the lands not occupied bythe Saracens.
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Fig. 86.—Plan and Section of the Kubbet-es-Sachra (Mosque of the Rock), Jerusalem. The Arabian conquerors attained to a greater independence inEgypt. This country was first invaded from Syria by Amru, oneof Omars generals, at a time subsequent to the occupation ofPersia. But Egypt had unquestionably contributed to the first ARCHITECTURE. l6l development of Arabian culture: its influence was more easily in-troduced across the Red Sea, from Assouan and Edfu to Meccaand Medina, than was that of Syria through the trackless desertsof the North. As early as the times of the exodus the civilizationof Egypt was introduced by nomadic tribes into Northern Arabia.The Caaba of Mecca, antedating the age of Mohammed, probablyowed its arrangement to some similar transferrence of Egyptianideas,—perhaps indirectly, as we are led to believe from the re-semblance of this ancient national fane of the Arabians to theMosaic tabernacle, which was a repetition, in movable tents, of theEgyptian temple.* I

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