The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. Art, Faith and Empire in Early Islam, by Alain George. Gingko 2021. Gingko Library Art Series. 260pp., 165 ill. Hardback 60£. ISBN0-13: 9781909942455.

Abstract

How to interpret the history of a building or space? The ideal method would be a stratigraphi-cal excavation within the structure. An excavation can reveal infrastructures, construction and renovation phases, evidence for looted elements, and sometimes hints for absolute dating. This is, however, only a wishful thinking for many historical buildings in the Islamic world. In cases where full excavation cannot be conducted, scholars record the existing remains, search for architectural parallels, and look for records made by locals and visitors along history. In this book, Alain George offers the latter methods. He beautifully reconstructs the historical layers of the Great Mosque of Damascus, treating it as a “palimpsest” (pp. 20, 41). The Damascus Mosque is a famous structure discussed by modern and early authors alike. Archaeological soundings in its courtyard in the 1960s (which George, I believe, is the first to make internationally public) exposed at least two construction phases. The author inter-prets an early phase of large stone infrastructures as a cella of a Roman temple (46-51). A later phase, pavements of white mosaic and large marble slabs, he interprets as a Christian structure (113-114). This excavation, however, was stopped in its early stage. Moreover, it has never been published, except for several photographs. George thus employs many more source corpuses for his reconstruction. His first corpus is photos and drawings of the mosque from the 19th and early 20th centuries. By using them (one of the chief contributions of the book), the author observes changes in the mosque within that period and since then. This careful investigation points, for instance, to the gradual replace-ment of columns and colonettes with pillars or pilasters (122-125). As we learn from the book, alternations are an inseparable part of the structure. Even more so, following its severe destruc-tion in the fire of 1893, substantial restorations took place in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, the mosaics in most of the mosque were repaired using modern techniques and, in some cases, new compositions were created. George clarifies that “these interventions invite particular caution about using the current state of the building and its decoration as a basis of study” (38). A second source type is 8th-century papyri from Aphrodito. These mention the transporta-tion of labour, food, and artefacts from Egypt for the construction of the Damascus Mosque. The evidence indicates that a mosque was built or furnished in Damascus in year 709/710. A third source an Umayyad Qur’an manuscript from Sana that consists of two architectural illustrations. George occasionally compares those with elements from the present mosque (101, 175). The book would have surely benefitted from an alternative interpretation of the illustrations as symbolic (Grabar 1992). I find the other literary sources George uses problematic. Along the monograph, he inserts three Arabic poems ascribed to poets from the 7th century. He provides the full texts as an appendix as well. He convincingly argues that poetry—even when appears in later texts—