Fragmentation and Reassembly: Decoration, Technique, and Meaning at an Early Islamic Platform

Abstract

Diverse plants, animals, humans, and supernatural hybrids decorate the paving stones of an early Islamic reservoir platform in the Azraq oasis, Jordan. Built for an unknown Umayyad-era patron in the late seventh or early eighth century, the platform is typically eclectic in its iconography but features an unusual composition adapted from Roman-Byzantine zodiac diagrams and unprecedented “jigsaw-puzzle” interlocking masonry. The stone pieces of this Umayyad puzzle echo the rhetoric of political and cosmic fragmentation and reassembly that appears in early Arabic poetry and chronicles, suggesting that Umayyad patrons and builders articulated meaning through technique as well as composition and content.