Mshatta

Listen for a moment. Out here, south of Amman, the wind moves across open, pale desert. Every so often a jet roars low overhead, rising from the international airport just beyond the walls. Then the quiet returns. Under your feet the ground is dust and loose stone. In front of you stands a long wall of honey-coloured limestone, broken by rounded towers. This is Mshatta, one of the largest of the desert palaces built by the Umayyads, the first great dynasty of the Islamic caliphate.

The Umayyads ruled from Damascus from the mid-seventh century until 750. Their princes built a chain of residences across what is now Jordan and Syria. Some were hunting lodges, some were bathhouses, and some were small farming estates. Mshatta was something else, a full palace complex planned on a grand scale. Most scholars link it to the Caliph al-Walid the Second, who ruled only briefly in the 740s. His reign ended with his murder, and work here seems to have stopped at almost the same moment.

That is the first surprise of this place. Mshatta was never finished. As you walk the enclosure, you will notice large areas inside the walls where almost nothing was built. Foundations start and then stop. Some rooms have walls, while others exist only as outlines in the ground. You are not looking at a palace that fell into ruin over centuries. You are looking at a building site that its workers simply left behind, more than twelve hundred years ago.

Look at the outer wall itself. The enclosure forms a great square, well over one hundred metres on each side. Rounded towers project from the wall at regular intervals. From a distance they look like defences, but they were mostly for show. They gave the palace the dignified outline of a Roman frontier fort, a style that the region already knew well. Power, in the Umayyad world, was something you displayed to every traveller crossing the plain.

Now walk to the southern side, where the main entrance once stood. Here is the second surprise, and it is a large one. The famous carved facade of Mshatta is not here. Most of it is in Berlin. In the early 1900s, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second gave a large section of the decorated front to the German Kaiser, Wilhelm the Second. The stone blocks were cut, numbered, and shipped to Germany, where they were rebuilt inside a museum.

What stays behind gives you a sense of what left. The facade was covered with a great band of zigzag triangles. Inside each triangle sat a large carved rosette, and around it ran dense vines, leaves, and fruit cut deep into the limestone. Where the carving survives here, run your eyes along it slowly. The stone was worked almost like lace. In strong sunlight the deep cuts become black shadow, and the pattern seems to stand off the wall.

Scholars have noticed one detail in that carving, and it is easy to miss. On one side of the entrance, the vines are full of living creatures, birds and animals among the leaves. On the other side, the creatures disappear, and only plants remain. That plain side backed onto the palace mosque. Many historians read this as an early sign of a religious idea, that images of living beings should be kept away from a place of prayer.

Step through the gateway and look up at the walls inside. The lower parts are stone, but higher up you will see courses of fired brick. In this part of the world, builders usually worked in stone alone. Brick vaults belong more to the traditions of Iraq and Persia, far to the east. Mshatta brings the two worlds together in a single wall. It is a small, physical sign of how wide the Umayyad empire reached.

For a long time, experts argued about who built this place at all. Some early researchers believed it was older than Islam, perhaps the work of Arab princes allied with Byzantium, or a Persian creation. The style mixes so many traditions that it was hard to place. Over time, evidence from the building itself, including the plan of the mosque and Arabic writing found on the site, settled the question. Today it is accepted as an Umayyad palace.

Walk straight ahead along the central line of the enclosure. The palace was laid out with strong symmetry. Beyond the entrance came a large courtyard, and beyond that, the most important rooms. At the far end stood the throne hall, with a long hall leading to a room with three rounded apses, shaped a little like a clover leaf. Here the caliph would have received guests. Stand in that space and imagine the light falling from high windows onto carved stone and painted plaster.

The hall also suggests how life here was meant to feel. Arriving visitors would have crossed open desert, passed through the decorated gate, and walked a long straight path towards the ruler. Every step brought them closer and made the building feel larger. It is architecture as ceremony. Even half-built, even with its facade far away in Europe, the plan still carries that sense of approach and arrival.

The setting today adds its own strange layer. Mshatta sits beside one of the busiest airports in the region, so modern travel and ancient travel meet here. Caravans once crossed this plain on routes between Arabia and Syria. Now aircraft lift away above the same ground. Because of this location, the site sees fewer visitors than the famous castles to the east. On many days you may have the courtyards nearly to yourself.

Before you leave, stand back from the southern wall and look at it one more time. Notice the colour of the stone, warm in the evening, pale and flat at noon. Notice the brick above the stone, and the empty spaces where rooms were never raised. Listen again for the wind, and for the next plane climbing overhead. This palace was a dream that ended with one man's death. What remains is unfinished, open to the sky, and very quiet.