Umayyad Caliphate
Architecture

The Umayyads constructed grand congregational mosques and palaces within their empire. Most of their surviving monuments are located in the Levant region, their main base of power. They also continued the existing Muslim policy of building new garrison cities (amsar) in their provinces that served as bases for further expansion. Their most famous constructions include the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus, while other constructions include the so-called desert palaces, such as Khirbat al-Majfar and Qusayr 'Amra. Among these projects, the construction of the Great Mosque in Damascus reflected the diversity of the empire, as Greek, Persian, Coptic, Indian and Maghrebi craftsmen were recruited to build it.

Under Umayyad patronage, Islamic architecture was derived from established Byzantine and Sasanian architectural traditions, but it also innovated by combining elements of these styles together, experimenting with new building types, and implementing lavish decorative programs. Byzantine-style mosaics are prominently featured in both the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus, but the lack of human figures in their imagery was a new trait that demonstrates an Islamic taboo on figural representation in religious art. Palaces were decorated with floor mosaics, frescoes, and relief carving, and some of these included representations of human figures and animals. Umayyad architecture was thus an important transitional period during which early Islamic architecture and visual culture began to develop its own distinct identity.

The later offshoot of the Umayyad dynasty in al-Andalus, which ruled the Emirate and subsequent Caliphate of Córdoba, also undertook major architectural projects in the Iberian Peninsula such as the Great Mosque of Córdoba and Madinat al-Zahra, which influenced later architecture in the western Islamic world.
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