1. It is strange that a building as important as Ukhaiḍir should not have been mentioned by historians or poets, since the district in which it stands was the theatre of much action during the first hundred and fifty years of the Hidjrah. 2. The position of the Qaṣr of Muqâtil, so far as somewhat vague indications allow it to be determined, would not accord ill with the site of Ukhaiḍir. There is, however, another way of accounting for the silence of early records, namely, by supposing that Ukhaiḍir was not in existence at that period. In this matter we can be guided only by such deductions as can be made from the plan, structure, and decorations of the palace. The plan of Ukhaiḍir is in many respects more closely related to that of the palace of Khusrau at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn than to the plan of Balkuwârâ. The latter palace is a further development of the scheme which is represented in a less complete form by the two other buildings. That this further development necessarily implies the lapse of any long period of time, or indeed of any appreciable period of time, between the erection of Ukhaiḍir and the erection of Balkuwârâ, I am not prepared to assert; it might be taken to denote no more than that in the one case the architects were called upon to construct a remote hunting palace in the desert, while in the other they were laying out a princely dwelling in the capital of the empire. A similar explanation might be given to account for the difference between the beautiful and varied stucco work of Balkuwârâ, wherein the influence of Hellenistic Syria and Coptic Egypt is apparent, and the limited range of the decorations of Ukhaiḍir, confined as they are to motives which had been borrowed by the Sasanians partly from Mesopotamian Hellenism, and partly from the Assyro-Babylonian tradition. But I cannot regard such reasoning as wholly convincing. The difference both in decoration and in structure between Ukhaiḍir and the buildings at Sâmarrâ are such as to place the foundation of the one considerably earlier than the foundation of the others.