Southern facade of the Mshatta palace

The stone facing on the southern facade of the Mshatta palace is entirely sculpted in relief. Between two mouldings decorated with foliated scrolling runs a long strip featuring a broken line. This long zigzag which, according to Kühnel, may derive from a popular Arab motif, divides the space into twenty-eight triangles set alternately on their bases and apexes. Each is decorated in the same way: the nucleus of the composition is a rosette, surrounded by a geometrical intermingling of plants sometimes accompanied by animals. Yet while the overall plan is the same, each triangle differs from the others according to which artist oversaw the work. Thus Kühnel has identified three styles for the area to the east of the entrance.

With or without additional decoration, foliated scrolling was frequent in the Christian and Iranian pre-Islamic world, and continued to be used in both East and West during the centuries that followed. Springing out of a vase, it follows a pattern dating from Roman times, sometimes used by the Sassanids and very soon adopted by Islam, notably in the Dome of the Rock mosaics. This pattern would later even be found in Safavid Iran – in the "vase carpets" for example. Some scrolling is further orchestrated with beaded circles suggestive of Sassanid silks, whose ornamentation continued to be used in Islam until the twelfth century. Much copied by the Byzantines, these textiles were exported to Europe, where they were often used for wrapping relics.

Absent from the area to the west of the entrance, which corresponds to the qibli wall of the mosque, animals are numerous on the opposite side. Often face to face on each side of a chalice, they recall an arrangement already to be found in ancient cylinder seals and then much used in Christian art to illustrate Psalm 42, in which the believer drinks of the divine word. Other patterns – birds for instance – seem directly inspired by Coptic Egypt, where some of the artists came from. They are accompanied by imaginary creatures: the centaur and the sphinx, taken from the classical culture that permeated the pre-Islamic Mediterranean; and the senmurv – the Iranian "peacock-dragon" – associated, under the Sassanids, with astrology, Zoroastrianism and the ruling regime. Originally a Central Asian deity, this animal is still to be found today on medallions and talismans as a symbol of prosperity. It was also much used in the Byzantine world and sometimes even in medieval carvings.[1]

The sole human figure, set among a scrolling of vines, suggests the seasonal workers to be found in certain Roman mosaics or at Qusayr Amra in Jordan. The vine is often featured in this kind of pattern purely and simply for its decorativeness, but here it may also have a specific visual function: shown with various felines it can be a reference to Dionysius. Nor would such recourse to antiquity be unique, a similar use being found in Coptic Egypt at the same period. The pine cones on the rosettes would seem to come from Sassanid Iran. In its combined utilisation of Sassanid and classical motifs and their adaptation to a new aesthetics – the broad coverage and markedly geometrical stylisation of the foliage scrolls – the southern facade of Mshatta can be considered a true example of the transition from the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to Abassid ornamentation in Samarra.