Heraqla
Heraqla ( Arabic قصر هرقلة, DMG qaṣr Hiraqla ) was a victory monument from the beginning of the 9th century of the Abbasid ruler Hārūn ar-Raschīd . The unfinished ruin is located near ar-Raqqa in northern Syria . Its historical and present name is taken from the Byzantine city of Herakleia.
location
Coordinates: 35 ° 57 '24.8 " N , 38 ° 55' 59" E
From the capital of the ar-Raqqa governorate , a side road leads almost continuously along new suburban development eight kilometers to the west to the monument on the road. It is surrounded by cotton and corn fields, which distinguish the wide irrigated river oasis of the Euphrates from the steppe. At that time Heraqla was right on the banks of the Euphrates, today the river runs three kilometers south.
history
Hārūn ar-Raschīd had undertaken a campaign against Herakleia, today's Ereğli in southwestern Anatolia . He defeated the army of the Byzantine emperor Nikephorus I there in 806. The contemporary historian At-Tabarī (839-923) considered this victory to be the most important Hārūn ar-Raschīds. From 796 ar-Raqqa was the capital of the Abbasid ruler, in 808 he relocated the capital back to Baghdad .
The German Eduard Sachau was the first western traveler to visit the monument in 1879 when he was on the way from Harran to ar-Raqqa, and thought it was a Roman fortress. In 1907 Ernst Herzfeld carried out archaeological investigations and suspected a terrace building which inevitably should have remained unfinished in the two years that Hārūn ar-Raschīd had only stayed in the city after his victory. Kassem Toueir, who has led the excavations of the Syrian Antiquities Service since 1976, came to the conclusion that it was a victory monument that was unique in its form in the Middle East. Until 1982 Toueir dug in the summer months in Heraqla and at the same time at Qasr al-Banat , a residence from the 12th century in the city center. Since then, the ruin has been left to its own devices.
Design
The almost square and compact building with a side length of 100 × 106 meters rises 10 meters from the plain and from a distance looks like a Roman fort. At all four corners square, massive towers with a side length of 12 meters protruded from the wall line. The walls consisted of evenly hewn stone blocks made of locally available, light yellow gypsum stone, into which Byzantine spoils were inserted and which were grouted with clay mortar. The Spolia possibly came from churches that ar-Raschīd had demolished in the year 806/7 in the border area to Byzantium. Burned bricks were used for the vaults and flooring. On the outer edges of the building, the stones have disappeared almost everywhere. Instead, the adobe packings and filling stones layered behind it now form the outer boundary. The inner area was filled with earth up to the top of the walls.
In the four Middles each a large, accessible from the plane was Ivan with a stone / Lehmziegelgewölbe. The half-open room was 30 meters long, 6 meters wide and 7 meters high up to the top of the vault. The ivans were flanked by towers that protruded 8.2 meters outward and were 8.6 meters wide. On each side two outside stairs led to the platform. At the top, wall walkways were pulled through the building and numerous room cells made of stone walls were laid out without a symmetrical plan, most of which were not connected to one another and had no windows. They were unusable dummy rooms that were later filled with earth and gravel. The excavators uncovered some of these rooms to the ground. The open spaces are now threatened with collapse due to the lateral earth pressure. In contrast to the Qasr al-Banat, Toueir did not carry out any restoration measures here. The east side is best preserved, the other sides have taken on the appearance of a settlement mound through further use of the stones as building material and through erosion .
The building was located in the center of a circular outer wall ring made of gypsum blocks of 500 meters in diameter, which was 2.5 meters thick and the remains of which can only be seen in the aerial photo, as the agricultural areas are gradually being extended into the archaeological area. The circular wall was reinforced every 20 meters by small defense towers, had four gates in the cardinal directions and was also provided with an outer layer of plaster of paris. Each entrance gate consisted of a room with a different floor plan. One was round, the space of the opposite gate was square, the other two were hexagonal or octagonal.
rating
The complex is unique in the Islamic world and remains a mystery to this day. The use of stone blocks, which is unusual in contemporary architecture, was supposed to emphasize the eternal character of the monument. The centrally aligned construction plan can be interpreted as a symbol for universal rule. Michael Meinecke took the view that the use of stone and other special features of the architecture were due to builders who were abducted from the Byzantine Empire.
The unit of measurement used in the construction was the dherʿa ( dhirāʿ , plural adhruʿ ), the length of which was determined to be 51.08 centimeters. Toueir believes that the result of deliberate planning is that all dimensions are a multiple of two dherʿa (the width of the east gate, for example, is the equivalent of 42 dherʿa ) and refers to the importance of numerical symbolism in Islamic architecture. The victory over Herakleia could have been imagined as the achievement of world domination, so the monument had to represent a world model with the four entrances as the four cardinal points.
Accordingly, Burchard Brentjes sees the architecture as a cosmic model and its origin in Central Asia: The Samanid mausoleum in Bukhara , which was built at the same time, has four ivans in the middle of a closed cube. The symbolism of the tomb can ultimately be traced back to the pre-Christian, circular shape of a central Asian Kurgan barrow.
literature
- Kassem Toueir: Heraqlah: A Unic Victory Monument of Harun ar-Rashid. In: World Archeology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Islamic Archeology), February 1983, pp. 296-304
- Georg Gerster , Ralf-B. Wartke: Aerial images from Syria. From ancient to modern. Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 2003, pp. 152–154
Web links
- Pat McDonnell Twair: A career at Raqqa. In: Saudi Aramco World, September / October 1995
Individual evidence
- ^ Eduard Sachau : Journey in Syria and Mesopotamia. Leipzig 1883
- ^ Friedrich Sarre , Ernst Herzfeld : Archaeological journey in the Euphrates and Tigris region. 4 volumes, Berlin 1911–1920, here volume 1, 1911, pp. 161–163
- ^ Michael Meinecke: Patterns of Stylistic Changes in Islamic Architecture: Local Traditions versus Migrating Artists. NYU Press, New York / London 1996, p. 23
- ↑ Kassem Toueir, 1983, pp. 301, 303
- ^ Burchard Brentjes: City, House, and Grave. Symbolism in Central and South-Asian Architecture. In: Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Center 0, 1984, pp. 3-6