Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi is the western of the two famous Umayyad palaces built to the east and west of Palmyra. This palace was built on the site of an earlier building and the stone tower still extant from that earlier phase has an inscription suggesting that it may have been part of a C6th monastery complex. The Qasr ("little castle") was built of mud brick, field stone and bricks and the whole was covered with a layer of stucco. The façade was covered with stucco decoration that was excavated from the site in the early C20th and reconstructed in Damascus as the façade of the National Museum. The frescoes and a number of stucco figurative three dimensional sculptures taken from the site are now on display in the National Museum.
Creator
Emma Loosley
Date of Visit
22nd July 2001
13th July 2002
Contributor
Daniel Hull
Rights
Metadata and all media released under Creative Commons
unless otherwise indicated
Related Resources
The photographs of the 2001-2003 survey and excavation seasons have been lodged with the Archaeological Data Service and are reproduced here with their permission. For those who would like more specialised information such as context and intervention numbers or direction of shot please refer to: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/dmeap_ahrb_2004/gallery.cfm.
Type
Architecture
Tags
Byzantine, Castle, Fresco, Khan, Monastery, Palmyra, Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, Sculpture, Stucco, Syria, Umayyad
Collection
Citation
Emma Loosley, “Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi,” Architecture and Asceticism, accessed December 22, 2024, https://architectureandasceticism.exeter.ac.uk/items/show/334.