Qasr Amra

I'm sure I've posted other pictures of the Qasr Amra before, although who knows. I'm closing in on a hundred Jordan posts, which, considering how much I love it there it's rather surprising that I don't have more. Qasr Amra is a feature on what is usually referred to as the Desert Castles tour that many folks participate in on a trip to Jordan. It's about fifty miles of so to the west of Amman as you head towards the Iraqi border. Qasr Amra is not actually a castle, per se, but rather a bathhouse. Cyndi and I visited it on our first Jordan trip, somehow didn't on our second, and we did again on this trip. In addition I visited it on my first trip to Jordan over fifteen years ago. A visit to it wasn't, oddly, on the first itinerary for this last trip, but Qasr Amra was prominently featured in one of our class readings so we talked to our great friend Fadi from Petra Moon Travel and it reemerged. Then when we got stuck in Montreal for a day it disappeared, but we fought to bring it back and I'm glad we did. It feels so different from traditional Islamic art/architecture, but it perfectly reflects its origin during the Umayyad period. The Arabic world had just begun to expand, and suddenly the center of the political universe wasn't Mecca or Medina but rather Damascus. This placed the Umayyads in contact with a much broader intellectual and artistic world, and it's reflected in their art. The bathhouse itself is out in the middle of nowhere, and it certainly was a universe all to itself.

Not a place where you would naturally expect to see a broader intellectual or cultural universe displayed.

A bathhouse scene you might expect to find in Rome, but not in the Jordan desert.

A true rarity, a zodiac.

A very talented bear.

You can clearly see the Roman/Byzantine influence.

A little pockmarked, but you can make out the monkey.