The Landscape of Palestine in Arabic Art

A paper presented at the Landscape Perspectives on Palestine Conference
held at BirZeit University November 12-15, 1998
The original unabridged version.

by Samia A. Halaby
See copyright 1998 below.

Our subject at this Symposium is the landscape of Palestine as it concerns the land of Palestine in all its historical and political dimensions from the earliest times to the present. It is very beautiful -- a land full of our ancestors which in its turn nurtures us. We the Palestinian Arabs have lived with it for millennia. In the most substantial part of our consciousness we feel that we are a part of a larger population and land entity with Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. This has obvious historical roots. And nationally, with them we share being Arabs. But for now, we Palestinian Arabs are either exiles or we are prisoners in some small parts of Palestine held there by foreign invaders who also hold most of our land and they profit by our work.

I have chosen to speak about our art and particularly about landscape pictures of Palestine within the larger context of the art of the Arab World including. This is a paper prepared to formalize a lecture. It is not a complete study of a subject which at first did not seem to be as promising as it did in fact prove to be.

What is a landscape? It is both the land which nature gives and it is the manipulation of the land using methods which human civilization gives. One of these methods is the creation of a view of land and what is on it of mountains, rocks, water, trees, other vegetation, animals, and people, and also what people build. How do we make a view of the land? We make it by using language.

This language of pictures includes imagery in mosaics, photography, oil painting, carpets, drawings, computer prints, and many other materials. Pictures are like a dish which holds food. If the dish is made of clay then ceramic media is used to make the dish rather than say glass or metal casting or stone carving. Shaping the dish flat rather than deep like a cup is the form of the dish. And the purpose of it all is to contain the food which nourishes us and that is content. In painting the content nourishes our minds and helps to build civilization.

One type of content in the pictorial arts is landscape which is a view seen by an artist and later recognized by others. Landscapes are of many types such as views of cities, gardens, wild nature, animals, clouds, oceans and other such.

Historically, landscape pictures can be descriptive of their subject matter in either a general manner or they can be precise and specific. That is, they can refer to views of land without reference to specific location or they can be an empirical observation of specific locations. For example, one can paint a painting from memory of the type of landscape in and around BirZeit without it being one specific location. There would be olive trees and stone walls and rocky mountains arranged in the typical ways of this area. This would have the flavor of the surroundings of BirZeit. Meanwhile if an artists sat at AlManara Square in Ramallah and painted the square it would be a specific landscape of specific things which do not occur in this precise arrangement any other place. Although we do not normally demand specificity from landscapes, we do know that scientific and empirical observation are an important step in the historical development of culture.

Landscape views of the general type are extremely ancient in origin such as those from the ancient art of Egypt and Iraq and China. Prehistoric views showing animals and trees and hunters even if they have limited formal syntax are also landscapes.

There are also landscape views which are neither general nor specific. This third type is abstract pictures based on nature. They represent not what the eye sees of appearances but rather what the mind understands of the rhythm and measure of nature. Abstract painters, of course, think that that is a higher more sophisticated level of visual thinking than empirical observation. And it is of course scientific in its attitude. Similarly, in most of our human disciplines, the ability to use principles abstracted and distilled from reality which can apply generally is more useful and more advances. For example in mathematics it is obvious that to know how to add is more valuable than possessing the answer to the sum of a set of numbers.

According to the present state of our knowledge, landscapes of a general type showing local flora and fauna were created in Palestine and near surroundings as long ago as 7500 years BC. That is as long ago as 9 1/2 millennia before our time there are examples of rows of men and of animals painted on rock faces.. Several examples, found at Tel Ghassul near Jericho, date from approximately three and a half millennia BC. One of them is described as being of "a large 8 pointed star with gazelles, birds, and humans." Another example is of rows of human figures which appear masked. They were found on the interior walls of buildings which seemed to be homes.1 Another example made of granite and influenced by ancient Sumerian and Assyrian art comes from Beisan and represents a hunting scene of a lion and a dog. It dates from 1460 to 1360 BC. There are also many examples of flora and fauna on ancient pots made by ancient Palestinians such as the Cananites and others. Although these ancient landscapes are general, they do represent the natural life and the peoples who were our Arab ancestors and who occupied the land of Palestine.

Ancient landscapes from regions of modern Syria and Lebanon are more numerous, and of course from Egypt and Iraq there are monumental examples from major civilizations. I present one example from among the accomplishments of the ancestors of the Lebanese Arabs, that is the Phoenicians, because of the geographic proximity. This example is a dagger shield which comes from Byblos on the Mediterranean just north of Beirut. It is a landscape of people and animals found at the "Temple of Obelisks" and dates from the 20th to the 19th centuries BC.

On the other hand, landscape views of specific places are a more recent historical development. They imply an advancement in knowledge. Some of the earliest landscapes referring to specific locations were done in the land of ancient Palestine, Syria, and Arabia, in modern Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Israel.. They date from the 2nd to the 8th centuries AD. They are a part of a larger body of work much of which was created under Turkish (Byzantine)2 domination but have attributes unique to the early formation of Arab culture from the various ancestral tribes and empires of the area. I will call them the early Arab mosaics in this paper as they properly deserve to be called.

The use of the term Byzantine by Western historians to describe these mosaics, should not mislead anyone into thinking that this art of mosaics was somehow European just because of terminology; or that it is European because it is Christian. The Byzantines were ancient Turks and their language of administration was Greek. But the ancient Christians of this area were neither Greek nor European. They were our Arab ancestors. Because Europe later embraced Christianity and Christian art and influenced the nature of both, does not mean that it gave birth to either. Still, most of us immediately get that impression because the history of art and most propagandistic media are in Western hands. Each and every Palestinian and Arab regardless of present religion should consider this art as their heritage.

Consequent to this information which will be expanded below, no Palestinian youth should believe the propagandistic attitude that easel painting came to the Arab World from Europe. The fact is the reverse. Christian panel painting had its origins among the ancestors of the Arabs -- the ancient peoples of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt all of whom later became the modern Arabs. It is not only on the basis of these mosaics that this statement is made but on the basis of the existence of wall paintings, burial panels, and icons in the earliest Christian churches in Egypt, Palestine, Greater Syria, and Turkey. A very special find was made at the church in Jerash, in modern Jordan, of two small icons dating from 531 AD.3

The early Arab landscapes were executed in mosaic and their most mature flowering was during the rule of the 4th to the 8th centuries. Greek was the language used for the many inscriptions in these mosaics to give the date, the religious administrator, the patrons, and amazingly sometimes the names of the artists who created them. These inscriptions show that the clergy of the churches were both spiritual and administrative heads and used the Greek language and Greek names. Palestinian Aramaic was sometimes used. The Lower Church of Al Qawaysma which lies 3 kilometers south of Amman is noteworthy in that it contains an inscription in Palestinian Aramaic which mentions two patrons, a man and his wife who, it is presumed, contributed to the building of the church. What is significant is the obviously Arabic names of the patrons who are Abd Raythu and Habbiba.4 This serves to remind us that although the official language of the Church was Greek and that many in the congregations used Greek names that the population of the area was essentially early Arab in its makeup.

Returning to the concept of the empirical landscape, one can find early landscapes of specific sites as early as the Han Dynasty in China such as the clay tile from Szechwan which is believed to be a view of the "Salt Mine at Ch'iung-lai."5 There are many landscape views among the ancient pictures of Crete, Greece, and Rome. Although I could not find detailed information, in my judgment several of them seem to be of specific locations. It is important to point out to our youth that excluding the eastern Mediterranean in ancient times, European painting arrived at the specific landscape long after the landscapes of Palestine and Syria.

While we cannot describe the Arab mosaics as being a first in the area of specific landscapes we can describe them as being some of the first such landscapes of history. This fact should be taken with seriousness and presented to our students to help them to estimate properly the value of their intuitions and cultural instincts which have a long and incredible history behind them. As educators this is a duty we must take seriously in view of the heavily funded Zionist invaders who try to control the education of our young and create a propagandistic smoke-screen of a false image of superiority for themselves.

These unique Arab and Palestinian landscapes are contained in the mosaics found on the floors of ancient churches, mosques, palaces and shops throughout ancient Arabia, Palestine, and Syria. On first view one is impressed by how much these mosaics share with neighboring arts surrounding Palestine. These mosaics exhibit attributes learnt from ancient Egyptian art and from the arts of ancient Iraq known as Sumeria and Assyria. Furthermore, one cannot miss the ancient Greek and Roman qualities in the mosaics. Most of all they fall within the larger tradition of Byzantine mosaics. All these influences from neighbors are typical and natural to the formation of all art.

But along with the above mentioned influences these Palestinian mosaic pictures also contain a new and a fresh innocence -- a special pictorial power. One might even call it clumsiness when it is contrasted to the streamlined excellence of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Iraqi, and Roman art. Yet this clumsiness reflects the confidence and energy of a new social order coming to flower among the ancient Palestinians. All those arts which neighbored Palestine came from societies which relied on slavery for their economic life. Ancient Roman, Greek, Cretan, Assyrian, Sumerian, and Egyptian societies all depended on slavery. At the time of the mosaics under question, Palestine was entering into the more advanced social phase of Feudalism. This is what, at the most general causational level gives the Palestinian mosaics their special quality of confident inventiveness and innocence. Most amazing of all is that they contain the beginnings of a pure Abstraction in world art. This early abstraction matured with the maturation of Arabic art and its mature definition by Arabs occurred approximately 1200 to 1500 years before its emergence in the abstract painting of the 20th century.

The progress of this new social order, freer and more advanced than ancient slavery, that is Feudalism, is further matured with the coming of Islam in the early 7th century AD which itself then accompanies the further maturation and growth of the Art of Palestine and leads it to a highly developed pictorial art of geometric abstraction.

To return to the mosaics, we see that technically they fall within the Byzantine mosaic tradition. But in form, they have original Palestinian attributes. Attributes so unusual and so outstanding that it is surprising that they have not been discussed in this manner previously. The basic cause of this lack of attention is the economic and social deterioration of these our lands and ourselves who are now clearly oppressed nations. Our oppressors will not praise our art, rather they would try to co-opt it while we are too poor and too busy with more pressing needs to properly deal with our own art history. That should change.

These mosaic floors are almost all of what survived of most of these churches. There are not as yet studies which might reveal how the walls were treated and if the form and subject matter of possible wall pictures were different from those on the floors. Three unique and historical attributes are contained in this mosaic art of Palestine. These three are, one, the formal space of a floor picture which shares the syntax of a carpet; two, the representation of specific empirical landscapes as noted above; and, three, the beginnings of geometric abstraction in the pictorial language.

An examination of the floor of the Church of St. Stephen in Ma'in, located in modern Jordan just south of Amman dating from the 8th century AD, demonstrates these three attributes. The appearance of a rich Persian carpet is unmistakable. The large rectangular central field is organized into rows which are landscape scenes of natural objects in horizontal sequence one row below another. Within other examples, sequencing might rotate along the four sides of the rectangle. This is a landscape format which has its origins in ancient Egypt. There are very important formal, spatial, and organizational principle which are found in the pictorial logic of the carpet format and the format of sequential rows. Treatment of these is too specialized for the scope of this paper. It is enough to point out that mankind's earliest landscapes were not organized necessarily as we would expect them to be today with our habituation to film and the camera.

There is usually a border which is divided into sections containing geometric motifs or views. At Ma'in our example contains sections of unusual pictorial views, landscapes, of Palestinian cities and towns. Some of these are: Al-Quds (HagiaPolis in Greek equalls Holy City which equals Al-Quds in Arabic)6, Nablus, Qaysaria (Cesaria), Ashkalon, Gaza, Amman (Philadelphia), Madaba. In other mosaics at other locations there are views of Beisan, and Jericho, both very ancient cities of modern Palestine. These mosaic are landscape representations of specific cities and towns on either side of the Jordan River.

(Figure 1.) Figure 1. Mosaic representing the city of Al-Quds (Hagia Polis) from the Church of St. Stephen in Ma'in dating from the 8th century AD.

Now that we have looked at several slides of these mosaics, we note how different they are from later European Christian painting. The difference, I believe, lies in the fact that these are some of the earliest Christian paintings of history and that the religion was as yet fresh and pure and not encumbered by bureaucracy or the many later layers of saints and myths which were not part of the original religion. It is important to remember that when the earliest of these mosaics were made the Bible did not yet exist in the form it exists today nor was adherence to it as yet general. This can be gleaned from reading the New Testament itself.

What is pictured in these mosaics is local flora and fauna of ancient Palestine and Syria, the activities of humble craftsmen and peasants, as well as the earliest saints. A simple honesty shines through their faces and through the delight with which these shapes are executed. There are no presentational pictures demanding worship such as the "Crucifixion" or the "Virgin and Christ Child;" nor are there frightening pictures of frontal personages standing in triumvirate formation commanding us into obedience. One has the sensations of voluntary and pleasant community participation.

One mosaic which has typical Byzantine presentational frontality and is prophetic of later European painting is the mosaic at the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. Built by the emperor Justinian, it dates from the 6th century and is presentational in nature with a central Christ and a St. John and a St. Elyas one on either side

These mosaics were not applied only to the floors of sacred edifices. Archeologists are finding them also in palaces, baths and shops. But it seems that it is the church on which the community extended most of its efforts. After the coming of Islam many Christians and Jews converted to Islam. There was not a replacement of the population by outsiders but rather a large scale conversion of the local population to Islam which was considered a renewal of Christianity which itself was seen as a renewal of Judaism. With this change we see the political, social, economic, and cultural maturing of the then nascent Arab World in Palestine. At this same time substantial new Omayyad Arab villas and palaces were built in modern Jordan which contained mosaics of the type under discussion. Indeed, mosaics of this type which date from this early period exist to this day on the interior of The Dome of The Rock7 and on the courtyard walls of The Great Mosque of Damascus.8

I also show slides of Omayyad murals at Qusayr Amra in Jordan dating from the 7th Century, of Qasr Al-Hallabat dating from the late 7th or early 8th century in modern Jordan, and of Khirbet Al-Mafjar near Jericho in Palestine from the same time. These palaces contain illusionist pictures representing landscapes in the traditions of the early Arab art of mosaics of the first eight centuries AD.

The third attribute of these early Arab mosaics, that of geometric abstraction is of special significance. It seems that the ancient Arabs, prior to the ascendancy of Islam in the Arab World, expressed a clear aesthetic tendency towards abstraction. This can be seen on the floors of several churches. Examples are the triple Churches of Saints George, Cosmos, and Damianus at Jerash dating from 526 to 534 AD; and the Church of St. Menas, the Egyptian martyr, at the village of Rihab in modern Syria dating from 635 AD. The floor of the Church of St. Menas is pure in its exclusively geometric patterns and abstractions.9 At the Omayyad Qasr (palace) Al-Hallabat The pictures are also strictly abstract and geometric like some of the earlier churches.

As a tangent observation, it is important to note that these villas were small and humble in contrast to the palaces and castles of ancient societies because in contrast to the ancients the new social order did not rely on the labor of slaves for its economic life. And its ruling layer was less centralized and more numerous as a percentage of the whole.

I stress the point here because it is so deeply and so badly muddled in Western art history. This point being that the development of and the causation behind Arabic art cannot be divided into Christian and Islamic. To understand what is happening we must not be blinded by the idea put forward by historians that the Arabs came to Palestine and somehow replaced or overwhelmed the local population This is how the oppressive history of the West and Israel might describe it trying to make us seem like foreigners in our own land.10

The historical facts show that Arabness as Arab World identity developed right here in our own land during the first millennium BC and the first centuries AD. That development began among the tribes and city states of the Arabian peninsula during the first millennium BC and continued through the Christian era in the areas we now call the Mashreq (The Arab East) during the first six centuries AD and matured during the Islamic centuries throughout the Arab World both Mashreq and Maghreb (The Arab West). Thus the coming of Islam marked a point of maturation but not a division between an earlier narrative pictorial art and a later geometric abstraction. Clearly Islam as the most modern feudalist religion was the landmark event of the maturation of Arab Culture from ancient ancestors. It is crucial to see it as a time of maturation and not a break in the growth of our culture. This point is crucial because if we fail to see the past clearly we will be looking at the present with confusion and we will not find the needed optimism and resolution to move positively forward.

Ample proof of this lies in the fact that the earlier Christian Arab art contained substantial beginnings of the later Geometric art and similarly early Islamic Arab art contained the narrative imagery which is typical of the above noted earlier arts of this region. The truth then is that in pictorial art a formal line of demarcation cannot be placed to coincide with the religious change. In its place I propose the theory which fits the facts more properly. That being, that the large and gradual conversion from Christianity and Judaism to Islam was the point of a change of religion as subjective expression of a deeper historical point of cultural, social and economic, maturation - that is the change in quality which comes at a certain natural point of increase in quantity.

The development of abstraction occurred in Arabic culture at this particular junction of history and specifically in this region of the world. And this development had little to do with the presence or absence of religious sanctions. The Koran had no strictures against narrative pictures yet the early Arabs devoted much to the development of abstraction. Conversely the Bible11 contained very heavy handed sanctions against narrative imagery and yet narrative imagery is intimately connected to Christianity. The arts seemed to disregard religious strictures. We can comfortably say that biblical strictures did not stimulate the development of abstraction among Christians anymore than did later Islamic disapproval of imagery stimulated abstraction among the Arabs.

The West as capitalist culture never really understood abstraction in the pictorial arts except as principles of the organization of narrative imagery. Its appearance in full bloom during the twentieth century was certainly not due to religious strictures or to Western (capitalist) culture but rather due to the cultural renewal attending the social renewal resulting from working class revolution in The Soviet Union. Meanwhile, one can see that the first Christians, the Arabs, did not pay attention to these strictures against narrative imagery and proceeded to lay the foundations for early abstraction.

The description above contains stress on the absence of a relationship between religious strictures and the disappearance of narrative imagery. The paper stresses that abstraction was a positive development with social roots and not merely a reaction to strictures of a religious nature. This stress results from the extensive discussion on the subject in the history of Arabic art. Western historians have generally disrespected Arabic abstraction by describing its flowering as merely a reaction to prohibitions and by labeling it as architectural decoration.

The causation for abstraction lies in Arabic culture and the new social order of Feudalism which underlay the formation of that culture. It was the cultural, linguistic, social, and economic development of the Arab World which brought abstraction to pictures. It is clear that while the Christian bible contained strong clearly stated stricture against making narrative imagery, the early Arab Christians made plenty of images while they voluntarily began to enjoy making abstractions. And later when most Arabs embraced the Koran which has no strictures against images they continued to make images while their love for abstraction began to mature and dominate. Abstraction in the pictorial art, then, matured first among the Arabs regardless of religion for deeper more substantial causes than religious strictures.

The maturing of Arabic geometric abstraction is the next phase of landscape art in Palestine. The earliest intact example of Arabic geometric abstraction is clearly demonstrated by The Dome of The Rock in Al-Quds (Jerusalem). The abstraction seen on the floors of early churches and Omayyad palaces is now developed to a high art on the walls of The Dome of The rock. This is a pictorial art which is abstract, geometric, and based on the geometry learn from nature.

(Figure 2) A view of the outer wall of The Dome of The Rock built between 685 and 692 AD. The lower panels are of inlaid black and white marble which date from the early 16th century.

The Dome of The Rock has been regularly restored and the large marble inlays on the lower panels of the exterior were added during Ottoman empire between 1520 and 1540 AD. Thus the abstractions on the Dome cover a period from the earliest beginnings of Arabic art to its latest periods in the form of the mosaics on the interior of the dome to the later exterior marble inlays.

That I am able to call this abstraction either pictorial or based on nature may baffle many. A long process of study and examination lead me to this persuasion. The development of this theory is laid out in a previous paper on Arabic art. In it the principles which govern how abstraction is extracted from nature through our visual experiences is explained. The further process of how this abstraction is a developmental step in the growth of pictorial form and content is also explained.12

Within this paper on the landscape of Palestine, it may be sufficient to mention that all that is in our thoughts about the visual language is based on the things we see with our eyes. Our thoughts reflect the world we see. We see and experience the measure and rhythm of nature. Our mind extracts from our visual experiences principles which are then tested for usefulness through practice and experience. We learn to measure and we test our measuring and if this measuring fails then our buildings and our plantings fail. So we learn abstract measure and abstract rhythms from nature and from the forms of our own human society and we use them as a basis for our pictorial arts. Among Arab thinkers the Sufis made it clear to us that early Arab culture admired what "The mind understands" as being superior to what "the eye sees."

Thus, if this harmony of measure is learnt from the land and the trees and the rocks then let us not mystify its sources and honestly call it landscape. The problem is not with the art or with the artists. The problem is with us and with scholarship in art which is unable to understand visual abstraction. I believe that scholarship in art history in recent decades has shown a willingness to be blind about the sources in nature and reality of abstract art.

Thus the development of geometric abstraction as clearly exemplified by the Dome of the Rock is another historical artistic event which the Palestinian Arabs can claim to have had a major part in. Its intellectual value to world art is immense and has not yet been properly treated and documented, all western scholars on the subject notwithstanding.13

Furthermore, the relationship of surface to building to the space around it and its coordination with our concept of place as landscape is an important extension of this theory. The coordination of rock and architecture in the Dome of The Rock and the way in which The Dome is located to visually crown the city is in itself another form of landscape. The Dome exudes a very Arabic concept of landmark and of city-center. It is a magnet which still today guides the hands of photographers. No view of Al-Quds has meaning without it. It is the ultimate artistic presentation of landscape. It even shamelessly adorns Israeli travel add on American television further exemplifying its power and their jealous attempt to co-op our culture.

While the new art of geometric abstraction was developing, the art of Christian icon painting continued to be practices in the Arab World. Two examples from the Master of Aleppo and from the Master of Al-Quds are here shown briefly as an interjection to point to the parallel existence of the three dimensional art of narrative illusionism in Christian Arab icons along with the three dimensional art of abstraction in Arabic art. While the Arabs developed abstraction, narrative painting using specific imagery continued as a secondary theme in Arab art history. It's practitioners were Christians who continued to execute icons though not with the richness and originality of the mosaics shown earlier. An obvious rigidity dominated the art during the Middle Ages as it no longer reflected a period of social growth. It came to be a secondary branch of minor proportions. The smallest attempts at modernization by copying European models which had now outstripped Arab icons was and still is rejected by lovers of these icons. The Arab icons of the middle ages are very few. They have been studied only minimally. We still have much to learn about them.

(Figure 3) "The Land of Palestine" painted by an unknown master during the first half of the 19th century. Collection Soursouk Museum, Lebanon.

I show "Entry into Jerusalem" and "Saint George Fighting The Dragon" both by Michael Mahna Al-Qudsy (The Jerusalemite) dating from the second half of the 19th century. Both icons show a landscape and city view in the distance. The second of them shows a city in the distance which is very probably Al-Quds. I also show "The Land of Palestine" painted by an unknown painter of the early 19th century which has qualities of form that recall the ancient art of the Arab World and which we will see in contemporary Palestinian painting. This is the tendency to use a narrative structure of small compartments containing segments of ideas which together build up the whole of the idea.14

The next strong phase of the image of the land of Palestine in Arabic art comes during the twentieth century. Maybe most of my audience will imagine that I will finally deal with the watercolors and drawings made of Palestine during the 18th and 19th centuries by European travelers. These were artistically inferior and are in truth travel documentation made for to take back home to show the exotic lands which might, someday, be conquered and owned.15 Such colonialist "Orientalist" pictures, to my own consternation, are highly prized among contemporary Arab collectors who have learnt to see themselves in the distorted mirror which Europe holds up to us rather than the true and truly wonderful mirror of our own history. Meanwhile, art of monumental and historical proportions lies in dust in our own backyard. These are the exigencies of history.

I will now briefly show some of the landscape paintings of Palestinian artists of the twentieth century. A year ago when I visited Ismail Shammout and Tamam AlAkhal with Naser Sumi we were given some wonderful news by Ismail. The total of this exciting news is now on exhibition at Darat Al Funun in Amman. The discovery is a Palestinian painter who had exhibited at the 1933 National Arab Festival of the arts, crafts, and culture which took place in Al-Quds. This artist is Zulfa Al Sa'di and among the paintings shown are two landscapes one of the "Al-Aqsa Mosque" measuring approximately 14 x 16 inches and the other "A village of Palestine" measuring approximately 10 x 14 inches, Both are oil on canvas dating from just prior to 1933.

There are numerous Palestinian painters who treated the subject of the landscape of Palestine during the twentieth century. I continuously discover these artists and their work but most of the time there is very little documentation or we are told that their works disappeared with the wholesale theft of our possessions, our homes, and our lands by Israelis.

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Copyright, Samia A. Halaby, 1998, All rights reserved. To request permission to reproduce any part of these words or pictures CLICK HERE.