Umayyad Art

Between 661 and 750 CE, the Umayyad caliphate expanded from the Arabian peninsula and Middle East to encompass a vast territory that stretched from modern Spain to Tajikistan. My research on the art, architecture, and built landscape of the Umayyad era takes a new approach to this material. I consider monuments in the provinces and frontiers of the caliphate, examine the roles of non-Arabs and non-Muslims in the production of early Islamic visual culture, and reconstruct the divergent rhetorical frameworks that the conquerors and the conquered used to interpret monuments.