+GENERAL SURVEY.+ While the Byzantine Empire was at its zenith, the new faith of Islam was conquering Western Asia and the Mediterranean lands with a fiery rapidity, which is one of the marvels of history. The new architectural styles which grew up in the wake of these conquests, though differing widely in conception and detail in the several countries, were yet marked by common characteristics which set them quite apart from the contemporary Christian styles. The predominance of decorative over structural considerations, a predilection for minute surface-ornament, the absence of pictures and sculpture, are found alike in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Indian buildings, though in varying degree. These new styles, however, were almost entirely the handiwork of artisans belonging to the conquered races, and many traces of Byzantine, and even after the Crusades, of Norman and Gothic design, are recognizable in Moslem architecture. But the Orientalism of the conquerors and their common faith, tinged with the poetry and philosophic mysticism of the Arab, stamped these works of Copts, Syrians, and Greeks with an unmistakable character of their own, neither Byzantine nor Early Christian. +ARABIC ARCHITECTURE.+ In the building of mosques and tombs, especially at Cairo, this architecture reached a remarkable degree of decorative elegance, and sometimes of dignity. It developed slowly, the Arabs not being at the outset a race of builders. The early monuments of Syria and Egypt were insignificant, and the sacred _Kaabah_ at Mecca and the mosque at Medina hardly deserve to be called architectural monuments at all. The most important early works were the mosques of +’Amrou+ at Cairo (642, rebuilt and enlarged early in the eighth century), of +El Aksah+ on the Temple platform at Jerusalem (691, by Abd-el-Melek), and of +El Walid+ at Damascus (705-732, recently seriously injured by fire). All these were simple one-storied structures, with flat wooden roofs carried on parallel ranges of columns supporting pointed arches, the arcades either closing one side of a square court, or surrounding it completely. The long perspectives of the aisles and the minute decoration of the archivolts and ceilings alone gave them architectural character. The beautiful +Dome of the Rock+ (Kubbet-es-Sakhrah, miscalled the Mosque of Omar) on the Temple platform at Jerusalem is either a remodelled Constantinian edifice, or in large part composed of the materials of one (see p. 116). [Illustration: FIG. 80.--MOSQUE OF SULTAN HASSAN, CAIRO: SANCTUARY. a, _Mihrâb_, b, _Mimber_.]