THE QUBBAT AL-KHADRA' AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF HEIGHT IN EARLY ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE BYJONATHAN M. BLOOM IT HAS LONG BEEN KNOWN THAT SEVERAL IMPORTANT palaces constructed by Muslim rulers in the sev- enth and eighth centuries had a feature medieval sources refer to as a qubbat al-kha4dr, which is usually understood in the secondary literature to mean "a green dome." Although K. A. C. Creswell briefly discussed this feature in his magisterial works on early Islamic architecture, its impor- tance was first noted, although not pursued, by Oleg Grabar over thirty years ago.I A reexamina- tion of the early Islamic qubbat al-khadr7' shows that it was a critical link between the palace traditions of the pre-Islamic Mediterranean lands and those of later Islamic times. The earliest example of the qubbat al-khadr was built in Damascus during the caliphate of cUthman (644-56) by MuCawiya, later the first Umayyad caliph. Adjacent to the first congrega- tional mosque in the city, Mucawiya erected a residence which was referred to as the qubbat al- khad ra. Itwas built of baked brick and had a door which led into the maqsiira of the mosque. It was still standing at the end of the ninth century when the geographer and historian Ya'qubi saw it. Ac- cording to 'Ilmawi, a sixteenth-century source quoted by Creswell, a Greek ambassador to Mu'awiya had said upon seeing it, "The upper part would do for birds and the lower for rats." Although Creswell followed 'Ilmawi's late and probably unreliable account in his assessment of the building, Herzfeld correctly interpreted Ya'qubi's account to mean that it must have been substantial, a "famous and splendid building." Ya'qubi is also the source for another example, for he noted that the Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, built a palace in the western city of Wasit, the Umayyad capital of Iraq. The palace was crowned by a qubbat al-khadr', known synech- dochically as the khart' of Wasit. According to Ibn Rusta, an early-tenth-century source, this struc- ture was so high that it was visible from thirty miles away. 3 A third qubbat al-khat4raP was built over the audience hall at Rusafa, al-Walid's capi- tal in northern Syria and the royal city of the Umayyads during the long reign of Hisham (724- 43). Grabar toyed with the idea that these domed structures at Damascus, Wasit, and Rusafa be- longed to an Umayyad tradition of building royal symbols, but dismissed it because the impact of Mu'awiya's palace could have been little more than symbolic. 4 That this architectural form was not exclusively an Umayyad type is shown by the example at Hashimiyya, one of the early Abbasid administra- tive capitals in the region of Kufa, which probably had one as well. According to the ninth-century historian al-Tabari, the caliph al-Mansur (r. 754- 75) had been in his khadra when the Rawandiyya rebels approached him and attempted to fly out the window, a context suggesting that the struc- ture was elevated. 5 Perhaps the most famous qub- bat al-kha.dr7 was the example in the Round City of Baghdad, ordered by al-Mansurwhen he found- ed the city in 762. At the back of the central palace, there was a reception hall (iwan) measur- ing 30 x 20 cubits leading to a domed audience chamber twenty cubits square. The sources do not state how one ascended to the similar domed audience hall that surmounted it, but the spring- ing of this upper dome is known to have begun twenty cubits above the second floor. This upper dome was known as the qubbat al-khadr; the top of it stood eighty cubits (forty meters) high and was crowned by a weathervane in the shape of a horseman. Contemporaries considered the horse- man "the crown (tj) of Baghdad, a guidepost ('alam) for the region and one of the memorable things (ma'thara) that one associates with the Abbasids."6 Itwas also a convenient metaphor for the caliph's power and authority. "If the sultan saw that figure with its lance pointing to a given direction, he knew that some rebels would make their appearance from there: and before long word would reach him that a rebel had appeared in that direction." 7 Like aweathervane, the horse- man was supposed to predict storms before they blew in. Consequently the collapse of the qubbat al-kha4trW and the horseman on it during a storm in 941 was indeed an omen: within four years the Buwayhids had entered Baghdad and established themselves as "protectors" of the Abbasid caliphs. Over each of the four gates to al-Mansur's