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Upper interior surface of a room. Many different types of ceiling are found in Islamic architecture, including Coffering, Artesonado, and Muqarnas. Only fragments survive from a few wooden ceilings in the early hypostyle mosques of the central and western Islamic lands. Beams from the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (8th century; see Temple Mount (Jerusalem)) are carved with a great variety of vegetal, geometric, and architectural motifs. The Mosque of Ibn Tulun (879) in Cairo (see Cairo §III 2.) had a flat wooden ceiling with a narrow wooden frieze nailed to the top of the arcades supporting the roof. Measuring almost 2 km Córdoba §3, (i) in length, the frieze was inscribed with verses from the Koran. The wooden ceiling from the Great Mosque of Córdoba (see) as extended in the 960s and 980s was dismantled in the early 18th century and later replaced. The ceiling comprised closely placed transverse beams supporting planks, the whole protected by a gabled roof covered with tile to allow an insulating layer of air between ceiling and roof to keep the interior cool. More than 50 fragments of the carved and painted beams from the original ceiling have survived in museums (e.g., Copenhagen, Davids Saml. 2/...

Term that refers both to the act of marking lines on a surface and to the product of such manual work. Whether it is summary or complete, a drawing is defined less by its degree of finish or support than by its medium and formal vocabulary. Manipulating line, form, value and texture, with an emphasis on line and value rather than color, drawing has been employed for both practical and aesthetic purposes. The language of drawing has been used to record, outline and document images that the draughtsman has observed, imagined, recalled from memory or copied. As in other art traditions, drawings in the Islamic lands record painters’ and designers’ practice. The history of drawing in the Islamic lands is intimately entwined with the history of paper, which was introduced to the region in the late 8th century but only became widely available to artists at a much later date, perhaps as late as the 12th century or 13th....

Term used for any systematic technique that renders the illusion of recession behind a two-dimensional surface (including receding lines, gradients of color, tone and texture, degrees of clarity etc.). Until the late 13th century, such pictorial elements in the painting of the Islamic lands as figures, landscapes and buildings were used as mere space-fillers and did not depict depth or distance. The Mongol invasions brought from China to West Asia a new mode of depicting space, and painters began to suggest a sense of depth by means of different ground levels with indications of grass and pebbles (e.g. Manafi‛-i Hayavan [“Usefulness of animals”] of Ibn Bakhtishu‛; Maragha, c. 1290; New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib., M.500). This formula was developed by the painters of the Rashidiyya scriptorium (see Islamic art, §III, 4(v)(b)) in favor of a wider space, a convention which was visibly inspired by Chinese hand scroll painting in the large horizontal format. The use of shading also helped to enhance a sense of three-dimensionality. A new interest in space appears in the painting of the Jalayrid (...

[Arab. bādahanj, malqaf; Pers. bādgīr]

Traditional form of natural ventilation and air-conditioning built on houses throughout the Middle East from North Africa to Pakistan. Constructed at least since the 2nd millennium bc in Egypt, wind catchers have also been used to cool caravanserais, water cisterns and mosques. Consisting of an open vent built on the roof facing into or away from the prevailing wind, wind catchers have shafts carrying the air down through the roof into the living area below, thereby ventilating and cooling the spaces. Wind catchers are generally placed above the summer rooms of courtyard houses. On the Iranian plateau, where the finest wind catchers are built, the vents are in the tops of brick towers which capture the faster airstreams above the general roof level. When there is little air movement, as on summer afternoons, the wind catcher acts as a chimney, drawing warm air up the shaft and through the living areas from the courtyard. In coastal settlements, towers generally face onshore winds. Most inland towers also face prevailing winds but in some desert settlements in the Yazd region of central Iran, where the prevailing wind is hot and dusty, vents similarly face away from the wind, and the preferred air from the courtyard is drawn through the summer rooms. In Iraq and central Iran, wind catchers are important in moderating the climate of the deep basements used as summer living rooms. In the Gulf and in Sind (the lower Indus region) wind catchers serve ground- and first-floor summer rooms....