24 A Short History of the Middle East
the pagan aristocracy of Arabia who, fully exposed in their new
Syrian environment to the influences of the old blend of Greek
and Oriental civilization, were ready to assimilate it and adapt it to
both their secular and religious purposes. The almost total de-
ficiency of Arab culture in the sciences and liberal and useful arts,
and the supremacy in these matters of the Christians, Jews, and
Persians, were freely acknowledged. The conquered peoples were
regularly employed in commerce and industry, banking, the arts,
as architects, engineers, and irrigation-specialists, as schoolmasters
and secretaries, even as court-physicians and political advisers.
The caliphs at Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries had some
Christian wazirs (viziers), and most of the court-physicians in the
early centuries of Muslim rule were Nestorians. The employment
of Christian advisers in Egypt as late as the fourteenth century was a
cause of annoyance to fanatical Muslims.1 The only function ab-
solutely reserved to Muslims was service in the army and navy.
Not only were the Umayyad caliphs' country-palaces decorated
in a mixture of Graeco-Syrian and Mesopotamian-Persian styles
which completely disregarded the orthodox Muslim ban on the
human figure,2 but also Graeco-Syrian influences strongly
affected the development of the mosque, whose architecture was
still rudimentary at the beginning of the Umayyad period.
Though the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem (often miscalled the
Mosque of Omar), which was founded in 691 by Abd ul-Malik,
was a shrine built for Muslim worship, it must nevertheless be re-
garded as a product of Christian art. Its plan, a circle within an
octagon, existed in the Church of the Ascension then standing on
the Mount of Olives, and elsewhere in Palestine and Syria. The
geometric setting-out of the plan and elevation of the Dome of the
Rock appears to be derived from Syrian-Christian architectural
practice. Before its exterior was re-covered with Persian tiles in
the sixteenth century it was covered with marble and mosaic, and
its external appearance must then have been as Byzantine as its
internal appearance still largely is.3 The Great Mosque at Damas-
cus, founded in 708, was likewise the work of architects and
builders supplied from the Byzantine Empire.
1 A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects. J. H. Kraemer,
Encyclopaedia of Mam, art. Egypt, 7.
2 e.g. the recently-discovered palace at Khirbat Mafjar near Jericho: Quarterly
of the Dept, of Antiquities of Palestine, XII (1945), 17 ff.
8 E. T. Richmond, Moslem Architecture (623-1516), chu II.