Ceramic floor pavement

This floor pavement comprised of ceramic tiles was discovered in the south-western building of the Palace of Manār in Qal‘at Bani Hammad. It is composed of two types of interlocking tiles, one in the form of an eight-pointed star coated with blue-green glaze and the other in the form of a cross coated with creamy white glaze. This pattern allowed the tiles to fit together infinitely and cover large surfaces. Commonly used on floors, these shapes were also found on walls adorned with ceramic, among other types of decoration.

It is curious to note that identical cross- and star-shaped tiling in similar hues, but intended for walls, can be found in the Qal‘a. On the cross-shaped tiles there is a metallic lustre decoration over the cream-coloured glaze. This lustre decoration was fragile; it was applied on the glaze and penetrated only into its top layers. For this reason it hardly seems conceivable that lustre tiles were used for flooring. It can be assumed that floor and wall tiles were mass-produced locally and that those intended for walls subsequently underwent separate treatment, during which the lustre decoration was applied and the tiles were fired a second time in a reducing atmosphere.

This type of pavement is very common in Qal‘at Bani Hammad and comes in a wide array of shapes, including hexagons, squares, four-pointed stars and crosses – shapes that are also represented in other materials such as marble and stucco.

This type of inlay or pavement technique, which was borrowed from antiquity or Byzantium, was already known in the East under the Abbasids. This technique of juxtaposing tiles of various shapes may have first appeared in the Maghreb in the course of the tenth century. In Mahdiya, as in Sabra Mansuriyya (Tunisia), tiles cut into diverse shapes covered the floors of halls and galleries. The introduction of ceramic inlay played a prominent role in North African and Andalusian monuments.

Ceramic used as architectural facing, more particularly combinations of brick and glazed ceramic, along with ceramic inlay, were known in the Iranian world and the East. In the palace of Qasr al-Banat in Raqqa (Syria), one of the places of residence of Caliph Hārūn ar-Rashīd (r. 786–809), excavations brought to light octagonal tiles coated with blue-green glaze which, like those at the Qal‘a, formed eight-pointed stars around limestone tiles. In Samarra (Iraq), fragments of cruciform tiles with lustre decoration were discovered, in particular in the palace of Jawsaq al-Khaqanī[1]. The combination of stars and crosses was also known in floor pavement and wall coverings of palaces and public edifices in Iran dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And in the West, painted tiles in the shape of eight-pointed stars dating from the fourteenth century[2] were excavated on the Place du Général De Gaulle in Marseille.

In later periods other developments in architectural facing occurred, such as those made possible by ceramic mosaic, which is formed of different polychrome glazed tiles re-cut into geometric shapes to produce endless compositions. This technique was widespread in Spain and the Maghreb.

The eight-pointed star motif was also used on a variety of supports – stone, marble, stucco, ceramic, wood and so on – and recurs in the Mediterranean Basin as well as in the Near and Middle East.