Page 49 - Arabiab Studies (IV)

Bayt al-Mu’ayyad 39
I: the lower wall areas of both rooms were intended to be solid,
pierced only by a rectangular doorway, as is still the case with
room B. The corridors D and G (Plates 4 and 5) are more complex,
each originally having a round arch in the southern wall and two
round-headed arches, the southernmost of narrow, the northern of
greater span, in the western face of corridor D and in the eastern
face of corridor G.
The only extant ornament on the outer surfaces facing the open
courtyard is in the form of a small plaster rectangle above the
entrance to room J (Plate 5): the panel is in the form of a mesh of
diagonals and I assume that a round-headed arched plaster
ornament of similar design formerly completed this tympanum,
although it has now fallen. The other entrances may also have had
similar ornamental plaster panels, but none remains. On the upper
floor, however (Plates 4 and 11), similar plaster panels embellish
the western and eastern faces of the upper-storey room above
ground-floor room C: the panel on the south face of this upper
room is a better preserved version of that already mentioned on the
tympanum of the entance to ground-floor room J (Plate 5), while
the panel above the entrance to the upper room over ground-floor
room C is more complex, with a rectangular plaster panel and a
lobed panel above, the motifs of diagonals and diamonds formed
of cut-out rectangular slits. To left and right are lozenges and
circles with stylised floral motifs.

(5) Interior wall surfaces. In their interior decoration, the rooms of
the lower storey of Bayt al-Mu’ayyad are all much the same as
each other and a description of the interior of room H will serve to
indicate the character of the interiors of all the remaining
ground-floor rooms (Plate 7), although details may vary. As with
all these lower storey rooms,5 the only source of natural light was
originally that reaching the room through the rectangular door­
way: the absence of windows was intended to exclude the harsh
sunlight of summer and to retain warmth in winter which can be
cold and wet even on the Gulf. Today, however, the broken panels
allow sunlight to enter the room throughout the day, distorting its
original character completely.6
The walls of room H are coated with white plaster. The walls are
constructed of rectangular piers supporting the timber roof, while
between the piers are recessed panels arranged in three vertical
ranks. The narrower southern wall (Plate 7) of the room has a
central round-headed blind arch in the lowest rank of the wall, and
seems to have been formerly flanked by similar blind arches to
right and left, although they are damaged. The second rank of the