Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/91

 A.D.) we find the Byzantine Emperor sending a mosaic worker and 320 quintals of tessarae for the adorning of the great mosque at Cordova.

In origin all Muslim art had a Byzantine beginning, but the traditions of Byzantine art received a peculiar direction by passing through a Persian medium, and this medium colours all work done after the close of the 'Umayyad period. Only in the west, in Spain, and to a less degree in North Africa, do we find traces of direct Byzantine influence in later times. But Persian art, as developed under the later Sasanids, was itself derived from Byzantine models, and mainly from models and by craftsmen introduced by Khusraw I. (circ. A.D. 528); but even at that early stage there were also some Indian influences apparent in Persian and East-Byzantine work, as, for example, in the use of the horse shoe arch which first appears in Western Asia in the church of Dana on the Euphrates, circ. A.D. 540. But the horse shoe arch in pre-Muslim times, as in India, is purely decorative and is not employed in construction.

Thus it appears that the real work of Islam in art and architecture lay in connecting the various portions of the Muslim world in one common life, so that Syria, Persia, 'Iraq, North Africa, and Spain shared the same influences, which were ultimately Greek or Graeco-Persian, the Indian element, of quite secondary importance, entering directly through Persia. Already before the outspread of Islam, Byzantine art had entirely replaced native models in Egypt, and