At Raqqah, according to Balâdhuri,[417] a mosque was built by Sa’îd ibn ‘Âmir ibn Ḥudhaim not long after the conquest of the country by the Mohammadans; and Muqaddasi, as I have already had occasion to mention,[418] speaks of one of the Raqqah mosques as built upon columns. My impression upon visiting the site in 1909 was that the earliest Mohammadan city must have occupied the ground where, among ruin heaps, rises a rectangular minaret. In connexion with this minaret I conjectured that the first mosque had stood (though possibly the minaret was not contemporary with the earliest building), and since the town to which it belonged was the successor of Nicephoricum-Callinicum, and there were no doubt plenty of columns at hand for the mosque, I conclude that it was Sa’îd ibn ‘Âmir’s edifice which was described by Muqaddasi, and that it is to be classed with the normal type of courtyard-mosque built on classical sites, i.e. it had a riwâq or riwâqs composed of columns. The khalif Manṣûr founded in the year A.H. 155 a second town, the ruins of which are still to be seen to the west of the earlier settlement. Upon this site there were no ancient remains,[419] that is to say that Manṣûr had not Roman or Byzantine materials at his disposal. Now within the walls of Manṣûr’s city stand the ruins of a mosque built upon piers (Fig. 32). According to an inscription over the central arch of the ḥaram arcade it was repaired in A.D. 1166 by the Atâbek Nûr al-Dîn.[420] It was surrounded by a wall built of sun-dried brick, which was strengthened by rounded towers. The ḥaram was composed of three rows of oblong brick piers, of which the northernmost alone is standing; the riwâqs on the remaining three sides were of two rows of columns which can be traced only by the holes in the ground whence the burnt bricks whereof they were built have been extracted. The central arch of the ḥaram is no wider than the arches on either side, but the niche in which it is set is carried up higher than the other niches, and M. van Berchem has suggested that it may have been surmounted by a gable, like the mosques at Damascus and Diyârbekr. It is possible that this was so, but both at Damascus and at Diyârbekr the central aisle is distinguished from the side aisles by its greater width. The round minaret in the ṣaḥn at Raqqah I believe to have been the work of Nûr al-Dîn. At Baghdâd, Manṣûr built a mosque of which we have nothing but the description. Its walls were of sun-dried brick and its columns of wood, each column being composed of two pieces, the ends bound together with sinews and glue and rings of iron, with the exception of five or six columns near the minaret, which were constructed of rounded pieces of wood.[421] [Illustration: FIG. 32. Mosque at Raqqah.]