Umayyad dancer

Dancer from the UMAYYAD CALIPHATE OF CÓRDOBA (10th century AD). The overall appearance, including the bare torso, the wrap-around skirt and the hairstyle, is based on the frescoes of Qusayr 'Amra (located in Jordan), which is the oldest surviving Islamic bathhouse, and the statues of Hisham’s palace Khirbat al-Mafjar (located in Palestine’s West Bank), both monuments built by the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus in the 8th century, still showing a strong Roman artistic influence, before they lost their massive empire to the Abbasids and fled to Al-Andalus, where they made Córdoba their new capital. The jewellery is based on several 10th century Umayyad finds from Spain, trying to match the jewellery depicted in the frescoes and statues. The scene takes place inside Córdoba’s Caliphal Baths (called hammam in Arabic), which were inspired by Roman “thermae”. Cordoba’s bathhouse had a cold room, a temperate room and a hot room. The ceiling was vaulted and pierced by small star-shaped skylights, which would let some rays of sunlight illuminate the rooms through the water vapour and the fragrant smoke from the incense burners. The ceiling was supported by horseshoe arches (which were originally covered in plaster and painted) and marble columns. While free women were expected to cover themselves with a veil in public during the early days of Islam, this rule didn’t apply to slaves (who were banned from wearing a veil) or women in general inside the baths, where going topless or naked would be the norm regardless of social status. The topless and naked women from Qusayr 'Amra, some of which seem to be dancers, represent bathing scenes and the court life of the Umayyad caliphs, in which not only topless dancers were involved, but also music and wine. Despite Islam being the new dominant religion of the Middle East, Umayyad caliphs adopted the luxurious and decadent lifestyles of the Persian and Roman emperors of Antiquity, abandoning the austere semi-nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors from the desert of Arabia who started the Islamic expansion.

THE UMAYYADS were the dynasty that ruled the second Islamic caliphate after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The first caliphate was ruled by the Rashidun dynasty, which conquered Persia, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. The Umayyads expanded the Islamic world further, conquering the Maghreb, Visigothic Hispania (later named Al-Andalus), Central Asia and northwest India. From their capital in Damascus, the Umayyads ruled between 661 AD and 750 AD the largest empire the world had ever known, extending from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. The Umayyads conquered the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo from 711 AD to 720 AD, with an army mainly composed of newly Islamised Berbers led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, and then launched a military expedition into Gaul, which was stopped by a Frankish army led by Charles Martel, grandfather of the future Carolingian emperor Charlemagne, at the battle of Poitiers (732 AD), in western France. In 750 AD, the last Umayyad caliph of Damascus Marwan II was killed in Egypt, victim of the Abbasid Revolution. The Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads, established the Abbasid Caliphate in most of the Islamic world, and executed all the members of the Umayyad family except one, Abd al-Rahman I, who managed to escape to Córdoba, where he founded a new independent Umayyad Emirate in 756 AD, which would later become the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba when Abd al-Rahman III adopted the title of caliph in 929 AD. The Umayyads of Córdoba not only were the nemesis of their Christian neighbours, but also had to face the constant threat of Viking raids, including the capture of Seville in 844 AD and the incursion of Al-Andalus by Björn “Ironside” Ragnarsson in 859 AD. The Caliphate of Córdoba ended with the regime of a Yemeni usurper known in Spanish historiography as “Almanzor”, famous for his military campaigns against the County of Barcelona and the kingdoms of León, Galicia and Pamplona. The caliphate finally disintegrated into many “taifa” kingdoms in 1031 AD.