A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [133]
The new city of Samarra was on a grand scale, with palaces gigantic by the standards of any age, built at great cost; more than 6,000 different buildings have been identified. A contemporary description gives some impression of the spectacular nature of one of palaces of the caliph, al-Mutawakkil, perhaps the greatest builder of all the Abbasids:
He made in it great pictures of gold and silver, and a great basin, whose surfacing outside and inside was plates of silver, and he put on it a tree of gold in which birds twittered and whistled … there was made for him a great throne of gold, on which were two depictions of great lions, and the steps to it had depictions of lions and eagles and other things. The walls of the palace were covered inside and outside with mosaics and gilded marble.
This was building mania with a purpose: this city of palaces and barracks was intended to dazzle visitors, to be the unforgettable centre of the huge Islamic empire.
Hidden away in a warren of small rooms in the caliph’s palace were the harem quarters with wall-paintings showing scenes of enjoyment and entertainment, and it’s here that our portrait fragments were found. They show us the faces of the caliph’s slaves and servants, the women and possibly the boys of his intimate world and of his pleasures. The women housed in these rooms were slaves, but slaves who enjoyed considerable privileges. Dr Amira Bennison, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of Cambridge, comments on the portraits that have survived:
They hint at the entertainment the caliphs enjoyed, which would have ranged from having salon sessions with intellectuals and religious scholars, to lighter events where characters such as those depicted in the wall-paintings, dancing or singing girls, would have performed before the rulers. One thing that is important to note is that these kinds of women were very highly trained – a little similar to geishas. To become part of the caliph’s household – a better word than harem – was actually something women could aspire to, and if you were of humble origins but you were good at singing or dancing, and you trained properly, this was very much a career move.
Here, there could be self-indulgence and boisterousness. Caliph al-Mutawakkil’s sense of humour doesn’t seem to have been especially sophisticated, and he repeatedly had a court poet, Abu al-’Ibar, catapulted into one of his ornamental ponds. Less happily, a tale in the Arabian Nights records al-Mutawakkil’s assassination following a night of music performed by his singing girls. After the drunken caliph quarrelled violently with his son, so the story tells us, his Turkish soldiers killed him, while the girls and the courtiers scattered in horror.
That story from the Arabian Nights is true. Al-Mutawakkil was indeed murdered by his Turkish commanders in 861, and his death was the beginning of the end for Samarra as a capital. Within a decade the army had left the city, and Baghdad resumed its status as capital, leaving the palace at Samarra as a decaying ghost. The court lions were put down and the slave girls and singers of our portraits dispersed. The last coin to be struck in Samarra is dated 892.
Samarra was built at the end of the heroic days of the Abbasids and, in a sense, it is a monument to their political failure. The tensions that led to the assassination of al-Mutawakkil ultimately led to the fragmentation of the empire. A poet, exiled in the now decaying Samarra, mused elegiacally on its decline:
My acquaintance with it, when it was peopled and joyous,
Was heedless of the disasters of Time and its calamities.
There lions of a realm strutted
Around a crowned imam;
Then his Turks turned treacherous – and they were transformed
Into owls, crying of loss and destruction.
Samarra was the capital of a major