Madinat al-Zahra

Madinat al-Zahra, the City of az-Zahra, was a great palace-city built a few miles west of Cordoba from about the year 936 by Abd al-Rahman III (rahimahu Allah), the Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus who in 929 had taken the title of caliph, proclaiming the independence and the supreme dignity of the Umayyad state in Spain. Conceived as a single, unified royal design and raised by an enormous workforce within a single generation, the city climbed in three great terraces up the slope at the foot of a mountain, descending from the caliph's palaces and halls at the summit, through the gardens and the apartments of the court, to the mosque and the dwellings of the city below, the whole built of finely dressed golden stone and adorned with marble, carved stucco and running water. Its most famous monument is the great reception hall, the Salon Rico, whose walls are covered with intricately carved stone panels of vegetal ornament of extraordinary delicacy, set beneath the red-and-white striped horseshoe arches that are the signature of Andalusi architecture, a hall made to receive ambassadors and to overwhelm them with the magnificence of the caliphate at its zenith. Madinat al-Zahra was at once the seat of government, the home of the court and the symbol of the power, wealth and high civilisation of Muslim Spain in its golden age. Its glory was brief: within some seventy years, in the civil wars (the fitna) that broke up the caliphate in the early eleventh century, the city was sacked, burned and abandoned, and it fell into the ruin from which it has been recovered by the excavators. This scene depicts Madinat al-Zahra in its splendour. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.