Music, Performance and Pastimes under Umayyad Rule

The Umayyad caliphate, a Muslim state ruled by a caliph, governed from Damascus in Syria from 661 to 750. After the dynasty lost power in the east, a surviving branch established an emirate, a state headed by a regional ruler called an emir, in Córdoba, in present-day Spain, in 756; its ruler adopted the caliphal title in 929. Córdoba was in al-Andalus, the Umayyad-ruled part of the Iberian Peninsula. Paintings, an ivory box and later music accounts reveal how rulers and elite households used music, hunting, bathing and games.

On this page4 sections

Music and hunting at a Syrian court

At Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi in the Syrian Desert, about 80 kilometres southwest of Palmyra, a floor painting dated 727 decorated the reception room in the palace’s east wing. The Museum With No Frontiers catalog identifies its patron as Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik. Two minstrels play a nai, a breath-blown woodwind, and an oud, a plucked string instrument. Below them, a mounted archer draws his bow toward a fleeing gazelle. The image places skilled music and mounted hunting in the same court reception room.

At Quseir Amra, east of Amman in Jordan, a fresco shows the hunt as a sequence of coordinated actions. Ghazi Bisheh identifies the animals as onagers, or wild asses, driven from a fenced enclosure toward a net. Figures holding torches appear to frighten them into the trap; a second painted panel shows hunters spearing and cutting open the captured animals. The scene turns a princely pastime into a process involving drivers, torch-bearers, mounted hunters and people who handled the carcasses.

Bathing and water at Quseir Amra

Quseir Amra was an early eighth-century Umayyad residence and garrisoned establishment. Its hammam, or bath complex, led visitors through a changing room, a warm room and a hot room. An animal-powered water wheel lifted water from a well into a cistern. At the furnace, fire heated water and air; the hot air circulated beneath raised floors through a hypocaust, a hollow space under the pavement, and terracotta pipes carried heat along the warm room’s walls. Pipes and a cesspool handled wastewater. The bathing sequence therefore depended on fuel, water-lifting and a maintained heating system as well as decorated rooms for visitors.

Music and hunting in Cordoban court life

The Louvre’s 968 ivory pyxis, a small cylindrical box, is inscribed for al-Mughira, son of the Cordoban caliph Abd al-Rahman III. One medallion shows a standing lute player between two seated men; others show mounted falconers with cheetahs. Art historian Sylvie Cuni-Gramont notes that the box’s findspot is unknown, although related ivories were made in royal workshops at Córdoba and nearby Madinat al-Zahra. She proposes a possible political meaning for the imagery but leaves the figures’ identities uncertain. The Cordoban objects and literary traditions page places this object among other courtly evidence.

Accounts associate singer and musician Ziryab with Emir Abd al-Rahman II’s ninth-century Cordoban court. Dwight Reynolds notes that Abd al-Rahman II and his brother al-Mughira made their households settings for public concerts and performances. The earliest Andalusi notice about Ziryab appears in Ibn Abd Rabbih’s al-ʿIqd al-farīd, written by a near contemporary; it recounts a performance at the Aghlabid court in Ifriqiya, in present-day Tunisia. Later accounts credit Ziryab with teaching singing and adding a fifth string to the lute.

Shatranj in Umayyad Córdoba

Chess, called shatranj in Arabic, had reached the Umayyad emirate of Córdoba by the middle of the ninth century, according to Robert Nedoma’s study of the game’s later movement into Europe. Its pieces did not all move as their modern successors do. The ferz, a counsellor, moved one square diagonally; the fil, or elephant, leapt exactly two squares diagonally, passing over the intervening square. Those restricted moves changed how players protected pieces and planned attacks, giving the Cordoban game a distinct set of tactical choices.