From Arabia to Bilād al-Shām: Muʿāwiya's Development of an Infrastructure and Monumental Architecture of Early Umayyad Statehood (original) (raw)
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The Umayyad World encompasses the archaeology, history, art and architecture of the Umayyad era (-). This era was formative both for world history and for the history of Islam. Subjects covered in detail in this collection include regions conquered in Umayyad times, ethnic and religious identity among the conquerors, political thought and culture, administration and the law, art and architecture, the history of religion, pilgrimage and the Qur'an, and violence and rebellion. Close attention is paid to new methods of analysis and interpretation, including source critical studies of the historiography and inter-disciplinary approaches combining literary sources and material evidence. Scholars of Islamic history, archaeologists, and researchers interested in the Umayyad Caliphate, its context, and influence on the wider world, will find much to enjoy in this volume.
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The seventh century CE in the Near East was an era characterized by major political transition and cultural change, representing a historical epoch that witnessed the decline of the region’s long-standing major political institutions alongside the emergence of a powerful Arab Caliphate that supplanted both the offices of the Byzantine Emperor and the Persian, Sasanid Shah in most or all of the region. This Arab Caliphate, first based out of the Hejaz, then out of Syria-Palestine with the rise of the Umayyads (r. 661-750 CE), the first hereditary dynasty of the Islamic period, embarked on a campaign of Arab and Muslim hegemony across three continents within the course of a century. Some of the Umayyad’s successes in terms of both the acquisition of and projection of power were not only the result of an organized and determined military and a steady stream of income from its territorial acquisitions, but also due to their ability to construct institutions and bureaucratic machinery that allowed them to create and control narratives through the production of inscribed material culture. Through various administrative and institutional mechanisms, the Umayyad caliphs were able to universalize the Arabic language and script and, by extension, promote a doctrinal form of Islam, both of which were accelerated by the development and expansion of their state and which played a critical role in the attempt to validate their political claims. Most importantly, an Umayyad monopoly on the cursive Arabic script, an orthography initially used by Christian missionaries in the Levant and Arabia in the sixth century, led to its appropriation for administrative uses by the Muslims which was then wielded as a source of political capital. The weaponization of the Arabic orthography enabled the Umayyads to decisively institute and enforce a new linguistic, cultural, religious and political order over the Near East in the era of Late Antiquity. The extant inscribed material culture implicates the Umayyads as graphophiles, obsessed with the written word and cognizant of its qualities and abilities in helping them impose their political will on their opponents in a battle for cultural, political and ideological primacy. Thus, this dissertation serves as an archaeolinguistic study of how the Umayyads instrumentalized and exploited the Arabic script on administrative material culture as instruments of authority and as purveyors of a new order in the region.
Dartmouth Undergraduate Historical Review, 2024
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Historiography and archaeological research have traditionally defined mosques mainly as religious spaces or places to pray, without further specifications. This simplification has usually dominated the analyses of mosques, while other uses or functional aspects of these buildings were put aside. The scarcity of material information available for years to approach these buildings, together with the dominance of the more monumental examples—such as the great mosque of Córdoba—provoked that analyses about other more modest mosques were scarce or almost inexistent. However, in recent decades, the proliferation of real estate building activities has led to the recovery of many new and fresh archaeological data related to other mosques different from the Friday ones. Specifically, in Córdoba, the volume of information recovered has been enormous, and concerns not only mosques as isolated buildings, but also their urban environments, construction processes, and evolution along the centuries. Therefore, in this paper, we offer a summarized overview of the state of the arts about research on mosques in al-Andalus, presenting the main problems and limitations of the topic until now, and also the case of Córdoba and the main results achieved there as a reference for further actions to be undertaken in the rest of the territory.