Hisham's Palace

On the northern fringe of Jericho, an Umayyad country residence has left behind one of the largest unbroken mosaic floors to survive from the early Islamic world: roughly 836 square metres of stone tesserae laid in the hall of a bath complex, divided into twenty-five square fields of geometric pattern in blue, red, green, yellow and orange. In a small apse off the same hall lies the panel that made the site famous, the so-called Tree of Life, in which a fruiting tree spreads its branches over two gazelles grazing peacefully on one side while a lion brings down a third on the other.

The complex was raised between about 724 and 743, in the last decades of the Umayyad caliphate. Tradition attaches it to Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, whose name it carries, although some scholars argue for his nephew al-Walid II. It is a classic desert qasr, spread over some 60 hectares and made up of three parts: a two-storey palace on a square plan with round towers at the corners, the bath hall of about 827 square metres, and a walled agricultural estate. Beyond the mosaics, the builders worked lavishly in carved stucco; a standing male figure holding a sword once greeted visitors above the entrance to the baths, and fragments of plaster ornament, human figures and animals have been recovered from the rubble. The buildings stayed in use long after the dynasty fell, and current research links their final collapse to the earthquake of 1033 rather than to the much earlier quake once blamed.

The ruins were first identified in 1873. Dimitri Baramki led systematic excavations from 1935 to 1948, Awni Dajani resumed the work between 1957 and the 1960s, and a joint project of Palestinian archaeologists and the University of Chicago has been digging since 2006. A small site museum has stood beside the ruins since 2000. Jericho itself, set in the Jordan Valley about 258 metres below sea level, is often described as the lowest city on earth, and its central mound of Tell es-Sultan holds traces of more than twenty successive settlements going back some eleven thousand years.

Getting there

The palace stands about 2 km from Jericho, roughly 3 km north of the town centre, beside the old road along the Jordan Valley. The nearest airport by distance is Amman Civil (Marka) Airport (ADJ), around 51 km away in Jordan; the route from there crosses the Jordan River at the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge, about 10 km east of Jericho.