QṢAIR
Among gypsum hillocks, about an hour’s ride to the north-east of Ukhaiḍir, lie the ruins of a village known to the Arabs as Qṣair.[33] There have been here a number of small houses, possibly lodgings for the gypsum workers, and I noticed several deep rectangular tanks, though whether they were intended for the storage of water, or were connected with the process of gypsum working, I do not know. Broken pottery was scattered sparsely over the ruin heaps; most of it was unglazed, but there were also fragments of blue glazed ware and a few pieces with a black glaze on the inner side. Such sherds as these are to be found on every site, mediaeval or modern, in Mesopotamia, and do not offer any conclusive evidence as to date. One large building is standing in ruins (Plate 5, Fig. 4). It lies approximately north-east by south-west and has been enclosed by a wall of sun-dried brick, set with towers. On two sides this wall was clearly visible; it lay thirty-two paces from the central edifice on the north-east and one hundred and ten paces from it on the south-west side. The ‘little castle’, from which Qṣair takes its modern name, is a long narrow building 45·15 × 8·95 metres. The walls, 1 metre thick, are constructed of stones and gypsum mortar, but the masonry is slightly different in character from that of Ukhaiḍir. The stones, instead of being broken into thin slabs, are used in thicker blocks, and the binding courses are of the same blocks, whereas at Ukhaiḍir they are almost always composed of particularly thin slabs. There are traces of plaster upon the walls, but window and niche angles are finished with large blocks cut with a certain amount of care, another feature which is not to be observed in the smaller materials of Ukhaiḍir. The north-east end of the building was divided off by a wide archway, of which only the returns in the walls remain. The chamber thus formed (6·30 metres long by 5·95 metres wide) was finished by a niche covered by a shallow ovoid calotte. The niche is rectangular in plan, 1·26 metres deep by 3·25 metres wide. The calotte was carried over the angles by shallow squinches, of which the archivolt was decorated with a zigzag ornament in plaster,[34] while at the base of the calotte there has been a similar band of plaster ornament. The construction of this niche recalls with fidelity the terminal semi-dome of a room in the Umayyad castle of Kharâneh (see below, [p. 114]). Above the calotte there is a small rectangular window ([Plate 45], Figs. 1 and 2). The back wall of the niche is exceedingly thin (·45 metre thick) and has in consequence broken away. There is a window high up in each of the side walls of the chamber, ·50 metre from the transverse arch.
The remainder of the building appears to have consisted of a single chamber 33·10 metres long. The south-west end is very much ruined. There are traces of five doors on either side, and of a door in the south-west wall. The two doors in either side wall at the north-west end of the chamber were flanked by windows—probably there were more windows, though the ruined condition of the wall makes it difficult to speak with certainty. As regards the roof, there are remains of the spring of a vault in the north-east chamber and on the south-west side of the southern return of the transverse arch. On the exterior, at the north-east end, the wall is set back above the top of the calotte, and immediately below that level the east corner is sliced off diagonally, so as to form a triangular niche which has been partly covered by thin slabs ([Plate 45], Fig. 3). Above the level of the calotte the angles of the building on either side appear to have been similarly sliced off. The side windows of the north-east chamber are rounded at the top, but the openings are so small that it was not necessary to construct these arches with voussoirs, and they are merely cut out of the masonry of the wall. The archivolt of the north-east niche is composed of a single row of voussoirs laid horizontally, as is the case in some of the more roughly built arches at Ukhaiḍir (for instance the door of passage 137, Plate 24, Fig. 2). None of the doorways are preserved up to the height of lintel or arch.
I am inclined to suppose that this building was connected in some way with the working of the gypsum. It is possible that it may belong to the same period as Ukhaiḍir.