Mshatta Facade

The Mshatta facade is covered with reliefs facade of the Jordanian desert residence of Mshatta from the middle of the 8th century.

The facade belonged to the palace of Mshatta whose ruin is situated about 30 km south of the Jordanian capital Amman. Even today, parts are located on the premises of the airport of Amman in Jordan.

It is in the entire plant to a plant of Umayyad square plan with 144 meters length inner side and a central courtyard of 57 meters in length. The palace therein was probably begun in the reign of Caliph Al- Walid II ( 743-744 ). He remained unfinished after the assassination of the caliph and was destroyed shortly afterwards by an earthquake. The term Mshatta ( " winter camp" ) was adopted by the Bedouins, as they found no tradition of the original name.

It was "rediscovered" in 1840 European hand. Because it was feared that after the construction of Hedschasbahn valuable components could be used in the immediate vicinity of the ruins of a cultural monument, won Strzygowski Josef Wilhelm von Bode, for the idea to acquire the facade of the Berlin museums. Bode suggested this Kaiser Wilhelm II, first of all in an audience, and then in a memorandum dated 3 April 1902. Finally, the facade was given away for degradation by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II to Emperor Wilhelm II. The Hedschasbahn then also opened the unproblematic removal of the facade. The greater part came in 1903 in the then under construction, Kaiser- Friedrich- Museum (now the Bode Museum ). Since shortly after Bode Julius Euting had approached with a proposal for making plaster casts to the Emperor, followed in 1904, a publicly registered controversy over the authorship of the idea.

1932, the south facade was built at the Pergamon Museum. During World War II it was heavily damaged. Today, it is next to the Aleppo Room one of the main attractions at the Museum of Islamic Art at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. There, the facade is constructed on a length of 33 meters and a height of 5 meters with two gate towers and gives a vivid picture of early Islamic architecture, marked by Roman naturalistic representation and early Byzantine stonemason techniques in Syria. The combined installation technique of dressed stone and brick on the walls of the building, the layout of the premises and the construction of the vault is, however, attributed to Persian- Iraqi influence.