"QASR AMRA" a Qasr `Amrah Travel Page by 1W1V

The complex comprised the baths, an attached audience hall and domestic rooms, the hydraulic system - all within a walled area -and a small square, fort-like residential building (or caravanserai) and nearby watchtower (or mosque) in the hills to the northwest, where the staff and troops of 'Amra's patron probably lived. There are also traces of what some people believe is an ancient dam, and enclosure walls that delineated an agricultural area of some 25 hectares (62 acres).

The eighth-century water system includes a 40-meter (131-foot) circular well, and remains of the saqiya, or water-lifting apparatus, still marked by the circle walked by some beast of burden that provided the power to raise the water and send it through ceramic pipes to the baths or the adjacent outdoor tank.

The baths were typical of the period, consisting of a changing room, or apodyterium; the moderately hot room, or tepidarium, with its raised floor to allow warm air to circulate beneath the bathers; and the hot room, or calidarium, closest to the furnace. The frescos in the baths display an equally wide variety of motifs and styles, including three busts thought to represent the three ages of humankind - childhood, youth and old age - and pastoral scenes reminiscent of those in Byzantine mosaics of churches in the region, in the several centuries before and during the Umayyad era.

Many consider the dome above the calidarium to be 'Amra's most pleasing combination of architecture and art. Presented as the Dome of Heaven, and painted with the constellations of the northern hemisphere accompanied by the signs of the zodiac, it is thought to be the earliest surviving attempt to represent the vault of heaven on a hemispherical, rather than a flat surface, as had been frequently done by preceding civilizations.

(c) saudi aramco

Arab physicians believed in decorating baths in bright, cheerful colors because, they thought, "a man loses some considerable part of his strength when he goes into a bath." To revive flagging spirits and "the three vital principles in the body, the animal, the spiritual and the natural," they advised that the walls of a hammam - a public bath -should be covered with pictures of hunting and fighting, of lovers and of gardens with trees and flowers. (See Aramco World, January-February 1978).