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to eradicate all human and animal images, pronounced
by Caliph Yasid II in 721. (3) The local
Christian and Jewish communities in some areas
objected to the animated motifs on the pavements
and carried out the disfigurement.
When
Scholars debate the dating of the iconoclasm
crisis, in the knowledge that the provinces of
Arabia, Palaestina and Syria were under Islamic
rule from about 636. Bagatti (1949: 256) and
Schick (1995: 223) maintain that the iconoclastic
movement must be dated after 719-720, possibly
owing to the decree of Yazid II and based on the
destruction of the mosaic at al-Quwaysmah (717)
and of the eastern mosaic panel on the Acropolis
church at Ma’in (719/20). Piccirillo (1993: 41-2)
maintains that archaeological evidence indicates
that the crisis must have arisen after the laying
down of the last figurative mosaics at Ma‘in, Al-
Quwaysmah, and Umm al-Rasas, dated to the
Umayyad period. Therefore, the undamaged
animated pavements at Madaba and Mt. Nebo
‘can be taken as historical evidence for dating
the abandonment of the church before the era
of iconoclasm’. He suggests, ‘since this phenomenon
occurs in all the churches of a town such as
Kastron Mefaa (Umm al-Rasas) and since all the
churches involved carried the name of the orthodox
bishop of Madaba, the archaeological data
cannot be explained as a sectarian phenomenon
within the local Christian community’. Piccirillo
further argues (1993a: 30): ‘On the whole these
signs of aversion to images in the mosaics of the
churches of Jordan testify to a period of crisis
which the Christian community in Jordan underwent
during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods,
after a time of relative peace and tolerance by the
Muslim authorities’.
The disfigurement and restoration or transformation
probably occurred at the same time
on most of the pavements, possibly later on the
mosaics with crudely repaired damage or with different
tesserae. Other instances where the damage
was careless and not restored may have been the
work of new residents after the churches were out
of use, at the end of the Umayyad period or later
(Schick 1995: 196).
Schick (1995: 207-209) concludes that the
icono clastic damage occurred some time after
the Islamic conquest, probably the last decades
of the Umayyad period. The damage was likely
to have been the result of an coordinated action
chapter ten
throughout the region at a single time.
Ognibene (1998: 383) claims that the iconophobic
crisis dates to a period immediately following
the years ca. 718-720—‘the last documented
period in which a group of mosaics with animated
subjects were laid and which have sustained a
detailed disfiguring action’. A second phase of
iconoclastic damage at the mosaic of the chapel
at #Ayn al-Kanish is dated to precisely 762; this
is evinced by the substituted geometric design of
the west part of the pavement and recorded in
inscription B. She maintains that the disfigurement
of the mosaic at #Ayn al-Kanish occurred
in a relatively short period, between the early
8th century and 762, when the iconophobic crisis
seems to have ended 1 .
*
The destruction of figures, methodical defacing,
and undamaged Hebrew inscriptions on mosaic
pavements and sculpture in the synagogues is usually
explained as the work of Jewish iconoclasts,
contemporary with a thematic change in mosaic
design to floral and geometric patterns (as on the
‘En Gedi and Jericho synagogue pavements) and
to inscriptions (at ‘En Gedi and Rehov). These replaced
figurative art on the pavements, perhaps as
a result of self-imposed restrictions by the Jewish
communities, possibly even before the iconoclastic
actions in Christianity and Islam (Avi-Yonah
1960: 34-35; Hachlili 1988: 398; Ilan 1989: 31;
Schick 1995: 202-204; Fine 2000: 190). It seems
to represent a change in the Jewish attitude to
figurative art in the late 6th–early 7th century;
Jews perhaps started to implement restrictions on
synagogue pavement decoration; a general reluctance
to represent human and animal forms
resulted, and the aniconic convention prevailed.
Some scholars (Avi-Yonah 1961: 42; Kitzinger
1954: 130, note 204; Barber 1997: 1022, note
11, 1034-1036) suggest that the strictness of the
Jews at the late 6th or early 7th centuries might
have been caused by the polemic with Christians
over images.
1 About dating the nave mosaic of St. Stephen at Umm al-
Rasas to 717/8 or to 785, Schick and Bowersock (1998: 697)
maintain that the original date should be 718, and the
inscription of 785 was probably rearranged.