Dictionary of islamic architecture

particular the stucco work with bands of Kufic
inscriptions and stylized tree motifs. In the 1020s a
ziyada was added to the south side by the caliph al-
Zahir. During the Ayyubid period this mosque was
the only congregational mosque in the city as the
Ayyubids did not permit more than one
congregational mosque within the city.
Further reading:
D.Berhens-Abouseif, 
Islamic Architecture in Cairo: An
Introduction,
Supplements to Muqarnas, vol. 3, Leiden
1989, 63–5.
J.M.Bloom, ‘The mosque of al-Hakim in Cairo’, 
Muqarnas
1: 15 ff., 1983.
K.A.C.Creswell, 
The Muslim Architecture of Egypt,
Oxford
1952–60, 1: 68 ff.
hammam (‘Turkish bath’; bath house)
General term used to describe both private and public bath
houses. Public hammams are found throughout the Islamic
world and together with the mosque are regarded as one
of the essential features of an Islamic city. Private bath
houses are less well known although it is known that they
existed from the early Islamic period where they have been
found in palaces such as Qasr al-Hayr and Ukhaidhir.
Hammams developed directly out of Byzantine bath
houses such as those discovered at Avdat, and
Yotvata in the Negev. One of the earliest and certainly
the most famous early Islamic bath house is Qusayr
Amra located in the north-eastern Jordanian desert.
The building was heated by a hypocaust system
supported on short brick pillars and supplied with
water raised from a deep well by an animal-powered
mechanism. Like other early Islamic baths Qusayr
Amra does not have the frigidarium common in
Roman baths although it does have an enlarged
reception room, or apodyterium, decorated with
frescoes in late Antique style. Other early Islamic
bath houses such as Hammam al-Sarakh, 
Ayn al-
Sinu and Jabal Usays have the same arrangement as
Qusayr Amra with no frigidarium. The one
exception to this pattern is the bath house at Khirbet
al-Mafjar where the heated rooms are approached
via a large hall (30 m square) resembling the classical
hammam (‘Turkish bath’; bath house)

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frigidarium, with a long pool approached by steps
and a mosaic floor.
There are few remains of bath houses from the
period between the ninth and twelfth centuries
although excavations at Nishapur have uncovered a
bath house with hypocaust heating dated to the tenth/
eleventh century. Sometime after the tenth century
hypocausts seem to have been abandoned (in Syria
at least) in favour of a system where the chimney of
the furnace runs under the floor of the rooms to be
heated. The effect of this innovation was that the
layout of rooms was dictated by the axis of the
chimney flue, and led to the warm room becoming
the central room of the hammam. The typical Ayyubid
hammam as it is known from Syria consists of an
entrance room leading to the warm room via an
intermediate unheated room. The warm room is
usually octagonal with smaller hot rooms leading off
at the sides. In baths built after the fifteenth century
there is no intermediate room between the warm room
and the changing room. As a corollary of this the size
of the warm room is increased in later baths, until in
eighteenth-century baths it becomes the main room.
The octagonal warm room often has a central
octagonal platform for massages whilst the smaller
warm rooms have stone basins for washing. The warm
and hot rooms never have windows but are lit instead
by thick glass roundels set into the dome. A further
development of the Ottoman period are twin
hammams where a bath house for women and a bath
house for men were set back to back to avoid the
prohibition of mixed bathing. This problem is usually
dealt with by having different bathing times for men
and women.