User:Ajlauricella/sandbox

Architecture
The largest building at the site is the palace, a roughly square building with round towers at the corners. It originally had two stories. Entrance was through a gate on the center of the east side. The inner rooms were aligned around a central paved portico, which featured an underground cellar or sirdab, for refuge from the heat. The room to the south of the portico was a mosque with a mihrab built into the outer wall. East of the palace entrance was a pavilion and fountain. Another larger mosque was located to the northeast of the palace entrance.

The bath complex is located just north of the palace across an open area. This free-standing structure is approximately thirty meters square, and three of its sides feature round excedrae which project out from the building. The east face of the bath had an ornate entrance in its center, flanked by excedrae. Inside the main square hall was a pool. The entire interior floor surface of the bath complex was paved with spectacular mosaic decoration. A special reception room, or diwan, was entered from the northwest corner. The floor of this room was paved with the famous "tree of life" mosaic, depicting lions and gazelles at the foot of a tree. The actual bathing rooms were attached to the northern wall of the complex, and were heated from below the floor by Hypocausts.

The palace, bath complex, and external mosque are enclosed by a retaining wall. The southern gate was knownfrom Baramki's excavations, but the recent discovery of a northern gate in alignment indicates that the development of Hisham's Palace was conceived of as a complete unit to be constructed at once.

To the north of the bath complex are the ruins of a large square structure which has clearly gone through many phases of reuse and reconstruction. This part of the site was initially assumed to be a khan or caravanserai, but recent excavations have indicated that the northern area had an agricultural function connected to the hayr during the Umayyad and Abbasid  periods.

Decoration
The decorative elements at Hisham's Palace are some of the finest representations of Umayyad period art and are well documented in the publications of Robert Hamilton. The most famous artistic aspect of the site is the "tree of life" mosaic in the diwan of the bath complex, although the mosaic floor of the main bath hall is no less impressive. All of the mosaics found at Hisham's Palace are of very high quality and feature a wide variety of colors and figural motifs.

The carved stucco found at the site is also of exceptional quality. Of particular note is the statue depicting a male figure with a sword, often presumed to be the caliph, which stood in a niche above the entrance to the bath hall. Additional male and female figures carved in stucco, some semi-nude, adorn the bath complex. Geometric and vegetal patterns are also quite common.

While Hamilton described the carvings at Hisham's Palace as amateurish and chaotic, many subsequent art historians have noted similarities with Iranian themes. Hana Taragan has argued that the artistic themes seen at the site are Levantine examples of an Islamic visual language of power that coalesced from Sasanian influences in Iraq. Prescilla Soucek has also drawn attention to the site's representation of the Islamic myth of Solomon.