The Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi rises on the outskirts of the Syrian desert, about 80 km southwest of Palmyra, as a masterpiece of Umayyad architecture. It was built by Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik in 727 CE to transform the desert into a desert paradise. The complex consists of a square residential palace centered around an octagonal courtyard, a bathhouse with suspended domes on plaster muqarnas, a caravansary for travelers, a dam, an artificial lake, and a walled garden irrigated by a sloping underground channel (fijj channel). Syrian-German excavations (2007-2010) uncovered geometric mosaic tiles with the signature of a workshop in Byzantium, proving the artistic exchange between Damascus and Constantinople.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi rises on the outskirts of the Syrian desert, about 80 km southwest of Palmyra, as a masterpiece of Umayyad architecture. It was built by Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik in 727 CE to transform the desert into a desert paradise. The complex consists of a square residential palace centered around an octagonal courtyard, a bathhouse with suspended domes on plaster muqarnas, a caravansary for travelers, a dam, an artificial lake, and a walled garden irrigated by a sloping underground channel (fijj channel). Syrian-German excavations (2007-2010) uncovered geometric mosaic tiles with the signature of a workshop in Byzantium, proving the artistic exchange between Damascus and Constantinople.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[359,210],"tags":[241],"class_list":["post-6837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heritage-houses-homs","category-homs","tag-partially-destroyed"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/syrian-treasures.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}