Between Every Three Or Four
Columns Stands An Octagonal One, About Four Feet In Thickness.
On the
east side are two shafts of reddish gray granite, in one piece, and one
fine gray porphyry column with slabs of white feldspath.
On the north
side is one red granite column, and one of fine-grained red porphyry:
these are probably the columns which Kotobeddyn states to have been
brought from Egypt, and principally from Akhmim (Panopolis), when the
chief El Mohdy enlarged the mosque, in A.H. 163. Among the four hundred
and fifty or five hundred columns, which form the enclosure, I found not
any two capitals or bases exactly alike: the capitals are of coarse
Saracen workmanship; some of them, which had served for former
buildings, by the ignorance of the workmen have been placed upside down
upon the shafts. I observed about half a dozen marble bases of good
Grecian workmanship. A few of the marble columns bear Arabic or Cufic
inscriptions, in which I read the dates 863 and 762. (A.H). A column on
the east side exhibits a very ancient Cufic inscription, somewhat
defaced, which I could neither read nor copy. Those shafts, formed of
the Mekka stone, cut principally from the side of the mountain near the
Shebeyka quarter, are mostly in three pieces, but the marble shafts are
in one piece. Some of the columns are strengthened with broad iron rings
or bands, as in many other Saracen buildings of the East: they were
first employed here by Ibn Dhaher Berkouk, King of Egypt, in rebuilding
the mosque, which had been destroyed by fire in A. H. 802.
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