Early Muslim Architecture

Samarra's Archaeological City is the site of a powerful Islamic capital city that ruled over the provinces of the Abbasid Empire extending from Tunisia to Central Asia for a century. Located on both sides of the River Tigris 130 km north of Baghdad, the length of the site from north to south is 41.5 km; its width varying from 8 km to 4 km. It testifies to the architectural and artistic innovations that developed there and spread to the other regions of the Islamic world and beyond. The 9th-century Great Mosque and its spiral minaret are among the numerous remarkable architectural monuments of the site, 80% of which remain to be excavated.

Asiatic Muslims have been using swastikas in architecture and calligraphy for a long time.  This paper will introduce the swastika, followed by a virtual tour of Islamic swastikas throughout Asia.  Finally, an analysis of the validity of this practice according to Islamic sources will be presented.

En este texto se intenta restituir el conjunto del Alcázar de Valencia en el siglo XIII, a través de los hallazgos arqueológicos parciales y las noticias documentales de época cristiana.
La información se puede complementar con lo presentado al congreso Fortmed 2020, "El alcázar musulmán de Valencia: una hipótesis funcional", donde se interpreta el conjunto desde el punto de vista de los usos, analizando las transformaciones y cambios desde el siglo X.

Roberto Berardi’s interpretation from the Seventies of the genesis of the Arab-Muslim house echoes the reflection on the studies by Pierre Bourdieu. "La maison ou le monde renversé" becomes an inevitable reference, in Berardi’s thesis the origin of the house transcends the physical dimension and elevates itself to the level of a symbolical representation of analogous counter-positions that are related to the dual division Halāl/Harām.

Between the 1980s and 1990s, the Almoina site in Valencia was excavated by the SIAM (Municipal Service of Archeological Research) and also, in the following decade, the subsoil of the Almudín and the San Luis Beltrán square. In these surveys, remains of the fortifications of the Alcazar were found, as well the royal cemetery and the palatine dwellings that were presumably inside the enclosure. However, the excavation has been partial and not allowed us to understand the functioning of the complex. The work presented here is our interpretation of the organization and evolution of the Alcazar from the Caliphate period to the Christian conquest. It is the mature fruit of a long personal reflection based on the analysis of the plans of the excavations, the confrontation with the original sources of the eleventh (Cidian chronicles) and thirteenth centuries (Llibre del Repartiment and episcopal acquisitions) and some medieval representations, as well as the comparison with other similar structures. The result must be taken with caution and is subject to all kinds of revisions, but we hope that it will help to understand better this fragment of the history of the city of Valencia. La comprensión del Alcázar islámico de Valen-cia es una de las asignaturas pendientes de la arqueología de la ciudad. A pesar de haberse excavado cuidadosamente la mayor parte del área en las décadas de los años 80 y 90, los restos que se encontraron no permitían entender su configuración. A partir de una relectura de esos restos y de la documentación cristiana del siglo XIII se ha intentado entender su estructura organizativa en la época previa a la conquista de Jaime I, trabajo que se encuentra en prensa (Iborra Bernad, Martí Oltra, 2019). Sin embargo, la estructura del Alcázar en época almohade no era más que el resultado de una serie de transformaciones ocurridas a lo largo de los siglos, que habrían condicionado la evolu-ción del conjunto, dejando evidencias de su existencia. En este texto vamos a intentar anali-zar cómo pudo ser el complejo palatino, enten-dido como un organismo dinámico, en el que los edificios cambian de uso o se derriban para dejar paso a nuevas construcciones, limitadas por las preexistencias. Debe quedar claro que lo que aquí se presenta no es más que una sucesión de hipótesis basadas en unos restos arqueológicos parciales-y a veces bastante escasos-y en información documental indirecta cuya lectura puede ser ambigua. Con estas limitaciones se ha intentado explicar el conjunto a base de razonamientos lógicos y funcionales, que quedan sujetas a futuras revi-siones y reinterpretaciones.

The castle and the epic of Digenis Akritis have an historical core connected to the Lakhmids (Mundhir III) and the description of his castle is a repetition of Umayyad desert castles. This reinterpretation of the Greek medieval epic calls for a reexamination of Graecoarabic relations especially on the field of the Greek folk poetry tradition.

The battle of Al Yarmouk, on of the most famous battle in history. A battle that changed the history of the Levant area, with the arrival of Islam and the culture integration between the east and the west. This battle is not only famous for its war strategies, but also for the defeat of the Byzantine empire by what was back then a small army of “Bedouins".