Chapter 8 - Page 2

to Moroccan art
is to be sought; though interesting hints and mysterious reminiscences
will doubtless be found in such places as Tinmel, in the gorges of the
Atlas, where a ruined mosque of the earliest Almohad period has been
photographed by M. Doutté, and in the curious Algerian towns of Sedrata
and the Kalaa of the Beni Hammads. Both of these latter towns were rich
and prosperous communities in the tenth century and both were destroyed
in the eleventh, so that they survive as mediaeval Pompeiis of a quite
exceptional interest, since their architecture appears to have been
almost unaffected by classic or Byzantine influences.

Traces of a very old indigenous art are found in the designs on the
modern white and black Berber pottery, but this work, specimens of which
are to be seen in the Oriental Department of the Louvre, seems to go
back, by way of Central America, Greece (sixth century B.C.) and Susa
(twelfth century B.C.), to the far-off period before the streams of
human invention had divided, and when the same loops and ripples and
spirals formed on the flowing surface of every current.

It is a disputed question whether Spanish influence was foremost in
developing the peculiarly Moroccan art of the earliest Moslem period, or
whether European influences came by way of Syria and Palestine, and
afterward met and were crossed with those of Moorish Spain. Probably
both things happened, since the Almoravids were in Spain; and no doubt
the currents met and mingled. At any rate, Byzantine, Greece, and the
Palestine and Syria of the Crusaders, contributed as much as Rome and
Greece to the formation of that peculiar Moslem art which, all the way
from India to the Pillars of Hercules, built itself, with minor
variations, out of the same elements.

Arab conquerors always destroy as much as they can of the work of their
predecessors, and nothing remains, as far as is known, of Almoravid
architecture in Morocco. But the great Almohad Sultans covered Spain and
Northwest Africa with their monuments, and no later buildings in Africa
equal them in strength and majesty.

It is no doubt because the Almohads built in stone that so much of what
they made survives. The Merinids took to rubble and a soft tufa, and the
Cherifian dynasties built in clay like the Spaniards in South America.
And so seventeenth century Meknez has perished while the Almohad walls
and towers of the tenth century still stand.

The principal old buildings of Morocco are defensive and religious--and
under the latter term the beautiful collegiate houses (the medersas) of
Fez and Salé may fairly be included, since the educational system of
Islam is essentially and fundamentally theological. Of old secular
buildings,