DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.45581#0116
Hammam is-Sarakh
XXI
first visit to this place I saw at once that the roof of the main room had consisted
of three longitudinal tunnel vaults of the same type and material as those of the
mosque near by which I had just left. The ruins were partly covered with snow, and
I saw what I mistook for fragments of small columns. I naturally assumed that the
three tunnel vaults were carried by arches supported on columns, as in the mosque,
and in this way made my first restoration (Ill. 60). My verbal description of the bath,
given to Professor Strzygowski in the summer of 1907, resulted in his mentioning col-
umns and arches in connection with this building in a paper on Koser cAmra. 1 I also
thought that the responds were too high to permit the use of arches of single span;
unless they were higher than the standing vault, which is quite possible.
In Section A—B an arch at the end of the north vaulted entrance, lower than
the vault, is shown; ribs are inserted in the dome, the little superposed conchas in
Ill. 59^. Hammam is-Sarakh: Pendentive and Section of Dome.
the pendentives are omitted, and the necessary changes are made in the supports of
the vaulting in the main three-aisled hall. In my hasty observation of the pendentives,
in the half-light of a stormy day in 1905, I had mistaken a limy stylactite formation,
- a deposit brought through by water from the dome above - for the little superposed
conchas often seen in Egyptian and Persian pendentives. I now find, on removing
the deposit, that the pendentives were built (Ill. 59^) in the ordinary manner employed
in the early dome at Djerash, in that at Brad, which I assign to the 2d or 3d century,
and in the domes of many Mohammedan wells in Syria. The dome itself was not
built of concrete composed largely of volcanic scoriae, like the tunnel vaults of the
main hall, as I had supposed; but was laid up in gores, with twenty projecting ribs
constructed of long, thin, wedge-shaped bits of shale entirely unhewn, and originally
completely covered by plaster. Ί he filling between the ribs is of shale. The crown
1 J. Strzygowski. Zeitschrift fur Geschichte der Architektur I, 3, p. 64.
XXI
first visit to this place I saw at once that the roof of the main room had consisted
of three longitudinal tunnel vaults of the same type and material as those of the
mosque near by which I had just left. The ruins were partly covered with snow, and
I saw what I mistook for fragments of small columns. I naturally assumed that the
three tunnel vaults were carried by arches supported on columns, as in the mosque,
and in this way made my first restoration (Ill. 60). My verbal description of the bath,
given to Professor Strzygowski in the summer of 1907, resulted in his mentioning col-
umns and arches in connection with this building in a paper on Koser cAmra. 1 I also
thought that the responds were too high to permit the use of arches of single span;
unless they were higher than the standing vault, which is quite possible.
In Section A—B an arch at the end of the north vaulted entrance, lower than
the vault, is shown; ribs are inserted in the dome, the little superposed conchas in
Ill. 59^. Hammam is-Sarakh: Pendentive and Section of Dome.
the pendentives are omitted, and the necessary changes are made in the supports of
the vaulting in the main three-aisled hall. In my hasty observation of the pendentives,
in the half-light of a stormy day in 1905, I had mistaken a limy stylactite formation,
- a deposit brought through by water from the dome above - for the little superposed
conchas often seen in Egyptian and Persian pendentives. I now find, on removing
the deposit, that the pendentives were built (Ill. 59^) in the ordinary manner employed
in the early dome at Djerash, in that at Brad, which I assign to the 2d or 3d century,
and in the domes of many Mohammedan wells in Syria. The dome itself was not
built of concrete composed largely of volcanic scoriae, like the tunnel vaults of the
main hall, as I had supposed; but was laid up in gores, with twenty projecting ribs
constructed of long, thin, wedge-shaped bits of shale entirely unhewn, and originally
completely covered by plaster. Ί he filling between the ribs is of shale. The crown
1 J. Strzygowski. Zeitschrift fur Geschichte der Architektur I, 3, p. 64.