Palaces, Cliffs and Mudbrick: Ten Building Traditions of the Near East and Africa

The path begins with the Neo Assyrian Empire, dominant from about 911 to 612 BC. Its palaces at Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh were entered through gateways guarded by lamassu, and their interiors were lined with carved relief panels in horizontal registers that told of the king's wars, hunts and ceremonies, all set over a mud brick core.

The Nabataeans reversed the Assyrian method of building up from the ground. Much of what survives at Petra, where Al Khazneh is the best known facade, was carved directly into cliff faces, and the same people built dams, cisterns and canals to hold water in the desert along the incense routes.

Armenian builders of the Highlands worked in volcanic tuff or basalt, raising tall structures whose height often exceeds their length, topped by conical domes said to echo Mount Ararat. Etchmiadzin Cathedral, founded in the 4th century, and the 7th century churches of Saint Hripsime and Zvartnots are counted among the founding examples of what is often called the first national church style.

Coptic architecture is the building of Egypt's Christian majority, from great cathedrals to rural village churches and desert monasteries such as the Monastery of Saint Anthony. Some scholars see in the church plan, an outer narthex leading to a sanctuary hidden behind an iconostasis, an echo of the ancient Egyptian temple. The Hanging Church in Coptic Cairo is among its most significant surviving examples.

The Seljuk dynasties of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries split into two branches. Great Seljuk builders in Iran and Central Asia introduced the symmetrical four iwan mosque layout, early muqarnas vaulting and the first widespread state sponsored madrasas in brick, while Anatolian Seljuk builders under the Sultanate of Rum drew on Armenian, Byzantine, Iranian and Syrian traditions and worked in stone.

Ethiopia's rock-hewn churches are carved downward out of solid volcanic bedrock, so that walls, roof, windows and columns are one continuous mass of stone. The eleven medieval churches of Lalibela, traditionally attributed to King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, and Bete Giyorgis is cut in the shape of a Greek cross roughly twelve meters into the rock.

The Mongol-ruled Ilkhanate, which held Iran from 1256 to 1353, continued Iranian Islamic building while advancing domed structures and glazed tile, and took new motifs from Chinese art after Ghazan Khan converted to Islam. Its buildings are noted for their great size, height and inventive ways of covering interior space, and the Tomb of Uljaitu at Sultaniyya, built between 1307 and 1313, is regarded as the masterpiece of the period.

The trading city states of the East African coast, from around the tenth century, built in coral rag cut from the reef and finished in coral lime plaster, and marked their houses with elaborately carved wooden doors. Kilwa Kisiwani preserves the Husuni Kubwa palace, built in the fourteenth century as one of the largest stone buildings in sub-Saharan Africa at the time, and Stone Town in Zanzibar remains the best preserved living example.

Across the Sahel, builders used banco, sun dried mudbrick, and left wooden toron beams projecting from the walls as permanent scaffolding so masons can climb the facade each year to renew the mud plaster after the rains. The Great Mosque of Djenne, rebuilt in its present form in 1907, is recognized as the largest mudbrick building in the world.

The path ends in Zimbabwe, whose architecture is defined by the Hill Complex, the Valley Complex and the Great Enclosure of the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe. Since 1954 builders there have drawn mainly on pre-colonial forms inspired by Great Zimbabwe itself, seen in the Kingdom Hotel, Harare International Airport and the National Heroes' Acre.