Talk:Horseshoe arch

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This article should be connected with "Arco de Herradura" in Spanish. An "Herradura" is a horseshoe.

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Visigothic origin
The arches in Iberia were built/characteristic of the visigothic christians based on the christian roman empire -Darío Fernández-Morera Associate Professor. Ph.D. Harvard University, author of 'The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REljGDVQJDs  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.154.24.98 (talk) 01:36, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

I am shocked it is considered Islamic at all, this article needs a massive edit Stianwick (talk) 16:07, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

The Bedouins have absolutely nothing to do with the dissemination of this architecture
--Adbouz (talk) 09:23, 14 April 2021 (UTC)It is useless to persist on the lie Islam and Arab civilization. The Bedouins have absolutely nothing to do with the dissemination of this architecture, known centuries before Islam, before Arianism. We are in the 21st century and we have all understood the "Islam from the desert" deception. We know that this religion is originally totally foreign to the Hijaz desert. Place where it is impossible to find two stones on top of each other in the 6th century. Kairouan, Cordoba, Basilica cistern and Mecca
 * Please do not use Wikipedia talk pages as a soapbox; see WP:SOAPBOX. R Prazeres (talk) 15:15, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Revising recent POV material
I've just cleaned up as best I could some low-quality, tendentious content that was clearly written to push specific POVs (ironically, each promoting opposing points), ignoring WP:NPOV and WP:OR policies, and making a bit of a mess in how the article reads. I've essentially removed them and rewritten any limited information that was actually relevant and verifiable, as far as I could catch. (My main edits are here:, , .) I've explained this in my edit summaries but I'm leaving a note here for a longer discussion if needed.

This edit last year cherry-picks less reliable or more marginal sources to promote a conclusion (that the Umayyads invented the horseshoe arch) that is clearly not reflective of most current reliable sources (given the abundant examples of pre-Umayyad antecedents discussed by other cited sources), not to mention removing sourced details that didn't fit that POV. Of the cited sources in the edit, the Saoud article is published by FTSD on MuslimHeritage.com, which as far as I can tell is not an academic (peer-reviewed) source, and the article itself appears to be of low quality. A second source, Wijdan Ali 1999, might very well imply, but does not clearly state that the Umayyads invented this arch (see p. 35 here). And a third source, Atteqa Ali 2020, mentions its development by the Umayyads but again doesn't explicitly say they invented it (see p.14 here). Some of these sources might support a much more qualified statement at best. It's telling that even a recent book specifically geared towards describing Islamic contributions to architecture, Darke 2020, does not present things so unequivocally or simplistically (see pp.129 and 166-167 if you have access to the full book). Aside from that, some of the older material was also unclear or not well supported. Some of the Umayyad examples mentioned were not supported by sources, or in one case (tagged earlier) supported by an article over a hundred years old (and citing a problematic example). I've removed these as well for now. If those buildings do contain horseshoe arches from the Umayyad period, there should be clear and current sources saying so.

This string of more recent unexplained edits went in the opposite direction and is a little more obvious. It inserted and needlessly repeated the same comments, mostly unsourced, attributing the arch entirely to church architecture, and of course deleting inconvenient sourced details. The only incomplete citations used appear to be about specific details while the rest, including some of the substantial claims, is WP:OR.

After all that, the last thing that could need updating and expanding is the lead, but I'll leave that for another day. Fixing the main content in the body was my priority. R Prazeres (talk) 10:39, 21 February 2023 (UTC)


 * The Umayyad innovation was the pointed horseshoe arch, as already alluded to, was it not? Iskandar323 (talk) 10:46, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * You might need to further clarify your question for me, but I think the answer is (so far) no. The article currently says the pointed horseshoe arch first appeared in the Ibn Tulun Mosque (9th century), and that they appeared in the far west around the time of the Almoravids. These details weren't affected by the edits mentioned above. Personally, for the more central Islamic lands I think there's probably more to say about it than that, but we need to delve into the sources more. (E.g. The Aghlabid mosques in Kairouan, mentioned lower in the article, have pointed horseshoe arches and pre-date the Ibn Tulun Mosque, though they're still from the 9th century.) R Prazeres (talk) 17:31, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * PS: I moved discussion of the Aghlabid mosques next to the Ibn Tulun Mosque for better context, but there is still some implicit contradiction with the other sources. R Prazeres (talk) 17:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The perfect source unfortunately lies just out of reach for me behind a paywall: Islam and the West: The Early Use of the Pointed Arch Revisited ... but I did find this rather more open source: Umayyad Arches, Vaults & Domes: Merging and Re-creation. Contributions to Early Islamic Construction History, which states: "The pointed arch, used both in arches and vaults, is an equally distinctive feature of early Islamic architecture. The arch from the Justinianic church at Qasr ibn-Wardan has been proposed as its earliest antecedent, but this seems rather to have been the result of inadequate centering or other construction difficulties. The first true pointed arches were built during the Umayyad period. The offset of the centres of these arches could vary from one-tenth of the span (at Amman, Qasr Tuba and Mshatta), to one-seventh or one-eighth (at Khirbat al-Mafjar)." The full academic cite can be found here, and I found a great many other papers that could likewise contain hints on scholar. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:31, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh ok yes, the "pointed arch" in general (i.e. not the pointed horseshoe arch specifically) is definitely a development in Umayyad times. Darke's book (Stealing from the Saracens) gets into this too (see after p.129). But I think that's a bit besides the scope of this article, and more for Pointed arch (architecture). R Prazeres (talk) 18:40, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * You have to be careful with that - there are Late Roman precedents, and Syriac churches earlier than "Umayyad times". But the whole topic is tied up in cultural willy-waving. Johnbod (talk) 18:46, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, I didn't mean to strictly attribute it to the Umayyads, just that it became a characteristic feature in Islamic styles as early as this period. Draper (linked above) and Darke discuss its pre-Islamic antecedents too. More reason to leave that particular topic for its main article. R Prazeres (talk) 18:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, my mistake. Low caffeination. Interestingly there is no mention of the Umayyads at all at Pointed arch (architecture) at present though, so it has still brought an obvious omission bubbling to the fore. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the more you look, the more you find things to fix and improve everywhere, hehe. R Prazeres (talk) 19:27, 21 February 2023 (UTC)