Khirbat al-Mafjar and Its Place in the Archaeological Heritage of Palestine

Abstract

The archaeological heritage of Palestine for the Islamic periods, especially the formative early Islamic period, must focus on the monument of Khirbat al-Mafjar, known as Qasr Hisham, near the city of Jericho (Fig. 1). The extraordinary beauty of its vast hall of mosaic carpets, stone and plaster sculptures-including human and animal figures-has long captured the attention of Islamic art historians and archaeologists. However, aside from specialists, there has been little consideration for its role in th e formation of Islamic civilization and its part in the cultural history of Palestine. Recovery of the MonumentThe first person to carefully investigate the site was Dimitri C. Baramki, who in th e early 1930s as a young Palestinian inspector for the British Mandate Department of Antiquities, traveled from his h ome in Jerusalem throughout Palestine (Fig. 2). His a ttention was drawn to a series of large mounds north of the town of Jericho, where carved stones were being removed and taken for use in the town and local cemeteries.Baramki began excavating in 1933 on the southern mound, revealing the fine-carved stones of a doorway and surrounding rooms along with stucco decorations (1936). His ini tial assumption of finding a B yzantine building soon changed as he recognized it was a quite rare early Islamic monument (Fig. 3). Baramki immediately realized the importance of these discoveries and wrote clear reports describing the archaeology of the site through the 1930s, with only a few comparative resources at that time. 1 When the excavations ended, he wrote a clear and concise booklet on Qasr Hisham ([1947] 1956) after his dissertation on these monuments (1953). Formation of a NarrativeThis archaeological analysis of Khirbat al-Mafjar stands in contrast to the writings of Robert W. Hamilton, then the young director of the British Mandate's Department of Archaeology in Jerusalem. As early as 1945 he took an Khirbat al-Mafjar is a w ell-known Umayyad palace complex located near Jericho. The monument is one of the most important cultural symbols of early Islamic archaeology in Palestine. This article discusses the site's initial association with the caliphate of Walid ibn Yazid in light of new excavations. Recent discoveries suggest the existence of an early Islamic agricultural estate and the potential for a n ew understanding of early Islamic qusur or proto-urban settlements.

Arboriculture and Viticulture as Investment in the Early Islamic Levant: An Archaeobotanical and Historical Investigation of the Site of Ashkelon

“…Ultimately, however, settlements on the arid margins of the region began to be abandoned in the seventh century CE, a process that continued through the tenth and eleventh centuries CE (Avner and Magness 1998;Magness 2003;Avni 2014;Ramsay 2017;Taxel 2018). Increasingly during the seventh and eighth centuries CE the location of agricultural production expanded to include newly founded farming villages (Taxel 2018: 163) and "agricultural palaces" (Whitcomb and Taha 2013), inter-settlement areas such as dunefields that would have sustained perennial and annual plant growth (Taxel 2018;Taxel et al 2018), and even abandoned areas within cities themselves, such as the irrigated gardens in abandoned warehouses (horrea) at Caesarea Maritima (Patrich 2011). Ultimately, the agricultural economy became less dependent on expansive agricultural estates and instead employed other strategies of agricultural extensification (Huster et al 2015;Taxel 2018).…”