The Image Destroyers

040

A curious episode in the history of iconoclasm—the destruction of sacred images—took place in eighth-century Palestine (present-day Israel and Jordan). The region’s Byzantine churches were often decorated with colorful mosaic pavements, including depictions of plants, animals, ordinary human beings and holy figures such as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the disciples and saints. Sometime during the eighth century, however, in almost every one of these churches, the human and animal images were deliberately annihilated.¹

But it was a gentle destruction: Those who obliterated the images typically removed the tiles with great care, scrambled them up, and reinserted them into the pavement—preserving the mosaic while erasing the images.

Equally curious: The obliterated images in Christian churches in Palestine were of ordinary people and animals, not holy figures. Thus the destruction of images in Palestine differs markedly from the Christian iconoclasm of the Byzantine Empire in the eighth and early ninth centuries—where only sacred icons were destroyed while other images of humans and animals were left intact.

Although it is possible that no single explanation accounts for the destruction of images in these eighth-century churches, the evidence now available does indicate that nearly all churches in Palestine suffered this kind of damage at about the same time. In only three cases did images seemingly exposed throughout the Early Islamic period remain completely undamaged: the mosaics, wall frescoes and icons in the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai; the mosaic with two birds at the monastery of Khirbat en-Nitla near Jericho; and the mosaic at the Monastery of Lot’s Cave at Ghor al-Safi in Jordan, dedicated in 691.

Surprisingly, a closer look at the nature of the damage, and when it was done, suggests that it was the work of Christians themselves.

Typically, individual tesserae were carefully plucked out of the offending images, leaving the surrounding pavement intact. Most of the damaged floors were repaired, sometimes crudely by using cement, 042plaster or pieces of broken stones, but more often carefully by reusing the mosaic tesserae. If the floors were to remain in use, the damaged images had to be repaired in some way; any gap would have quickly widened as people knocked out other cubes while stepping along the edges of the break.

In many cases, repairs were done in an artistic manner that clearly reflects concern for the aesthetic appearance of the mosaic. At Farah al-Hashimiyah, simple geometric shapes fill the space where the images once were. The most humorous example is the church at Ma‘in, where the image-destroyers transformed a bull into a tree but left the animal’s hooves intact. Perhaps the most artistic example of a disguised image is from Khirbat ’Asida, where a lion was turned into flowers. Although this mosaic was destroyed when the church was razed to make way for housing decades ago, black-and-white photographs show that the mosaic was disturbed as little as possible by the iconoclasts more than 12 centuries ago; some of tesserae making up the lion were left in place while others were replaced or moved around to form the plants.

Especially puzzling are mosaic floors where only some of the images were damaged, leaving other nearby images intact. At Khildah, two birds that escaped damage are right next to other damaged images. The undamaged fish in the mosaic of the Church of Saint Stephen at Umm al-Rasas in Jordan was clearly visible to the people who damaged the other nearby images. Did the Saint Stephen fish survive because it was a depiction of a dead fish, while all of the other images were of living people and animals? In the very same mosaic, another fish was created as part of the repairs to the deliberate damage of a phoenix.

Those who did the damage did not distinguish between images of people and images of animals. In some cases, the damage was limited to the heads and feet of the birds and fish, leaving their torsos intact.

Nor was the damage confined to images in mosaic floors. At the Church of the Lions at Umm al-Rasas, the images on the chancel screen panels that separate the altar area from the nave and side aisles were also damaged. In the Civic Complex Church at Pella in the Jordan Valley, images of two sheep on the chancel screen were cut away and the panel was then recycled by being placed face down in the apse. In the Procopius Church at Jerash, two sheep on the chancel screen were damaged, and in the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian at Susita in the Golan, the dolphin on the chancel screen was damaged.

By contrast, mosaic images, stone and stucco carvings, and wall paintings in contemporaneous secular buildings suffered no damage. In not a single case were secular images destroyed or camouflaged. The statues at the Umayyad palace of Khirbat al-Mafjar (Hisham’s Palace) in Jericho and the wall painting at the Umayyad bath of Qusayr ‘Amra in Jordan, for example, reveal that Muslims did not object to images used for secular purposes.

When was the damage done? Unfortunately, valuable information has been lost because of poor excavation techniques and lack of publication. But the excavation of a number of churches—for example, at the sites of Nitl and Umm al-Rasas, both in Jordan—have produced pottery generally datable to the eighth century from layers above the mosaic floors. Thus these floors could not have been laid later than the eighth century.

A number of churches also contain inscriptions telling us when the churches, or their mosaic floors, were dedicated. An inscription at Khildah dates its mosaic floor to 685; the lower church at al-Quwaysmah was dedicated in 717–718; the Church of Saint Stephen at Umm al-Rasas was dedicated in 043October 718; and the acropolis church at Ma‘in was dedicated in 719–720.

Clearly, much effort was put into defacing the images. It could have been different: One can imagine vandals smashing up the floors, or angry iconoclasts plastering over the offensive images. Instead, the tesserae were often carefully removed and scrambled. The people who did the damage, and who made the repairs, wanted to keep the mosaic floors intact and in use, and they were willing to invest the time and effort needed to keep the floors attractive. This means that the repairs—and the damage—were done by the local Christian congregations, who wanted to preserve their houses of worship. That the Christians did the repairs is clearly demonstrated in the mosaic at Massuh, where a cross and a church building were added to the mosaic as part of the repairs.

Why would Christians damage their own churches?

Despite the biblical prohibition on “graven images” (Exodus 20:4), the practice of the veneration of icons of Jesus, the Virgin, saints and martyrs became increasingly pronounced in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the early eighth century, several Anatolian bishops, particularly Constantine of Nakoleia and Thomas of Claudiopolis, campaigned against the veneration of images, citing traditional biblical injunctions against idolatry. In 726 the Byzantine emperor Leo III gave public support to the bishops’ position; four years later, Leo issued an edict commanding the destruction of icons of saints. Then in 754 Emperor Constantine V broadened the movement against sacred images. At Hieria, near Constantinople, the emperor convened a church council that condemned icon worship as diabolical and insisted that Christ could only be represented non-anthropomorphically in the Eucharist. This ruling resulted in the destruction of numerous Byzantine icons and in several martyrdoms.

But the Byzantine iconoclasts were strictly concerned with icons of sacred figures. According to 044Stephen the Younger (c. 714–764), an iconophile who was martyred for his beliefs, the iconoclasts under Constantine V did not object to ordinary images:

And wherever there were venerable images of Christ or the Mother of God or the saints, these were consigned to the flames or were gouged out or smeared over. If, on the other hand, there were pictures of trees or birds or senseless beasts and, in particular, satanic horse-races, hunts, theatrical and hippodrome scenes, these were preserved with honor and given greater lustre.²

Thus Byzantine iconoclasm outside of Palestine is almost exactly the opposite of what we find inside Palestine, where images of ordinary people and animals were destroyed. Even though the damage took place in the two areas at roughly the same time, these two very different kinds of destruction of images had little or nothing to do with one another.

Indeed, during the iconoclastic controversy in the Byzantine Empire, some Christians in Palestine remained in favor of icons. The theologian Saint John of Damascus (c. 675–749), for example, staunchly defended the use of icons and wrote a number of tracts against the iconoclasts. Later, in the ninth century, Saints Theodore and Theophanes, natives of Jordan, traveled to Constantinople to defend the veneration of icons. (The iconoclastic Byzantine authorities responded by branding their foreheads with the poetic Greek equivalent of “I like icons.” Hence, the two saints are often referred to as the Graphti, or “written on,” brothers.) There is, in fact, no literary evidence for any support among Christians in Palestine for Byzantine iconoclasm—that is, for the deliberate destruction of sacred images.

So we have to turn our sights elsewhere. The 045Arabs conquered Jerusalem in 638, so by the eighth century Palestine had for some time been under Muslim control. Reports (hadith in Arabic) of the rulings and actions of the prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632) show that Muslims were opposed to the depiction of all living beings, on the grounds that the depiction of a living being that possessed the “breath of life” was a blasphemous imitation of the creative act of God. The issue first began to be raised towards the end of the seventh century, and the prohibition on depictions of people and animals had been generally agreed upon by the early years of the eighth century.³

This Muslim form of opposition to images corresponds better to the physical evidence from the mosaic floors in the churches of Palestine than does Byzantine iconoclasm. But there is little literary evidence to point to Muslim action against images, as opposed to general harassment of Christians in the form of prohibitions against the public display of crosses and other legal restrictions.⁴

The most widely known source for Muslim opposition to images is the iconoclastic edict issued in 721 by Yazid II of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), which ruled Palestine from Damascus.⁵ The earliest and most detailed account of the edict was delivered by John, a presbyter from Jerusalem, to the Second Church Council of Nicaea in 787—which formally condemned the iconoclastic ruling of Constantine V’s Council of Hieria. John reported that a Jewish sorcerer in Tiberias told Yazid II that his reign would last 30 years if only he issued an edict against images:

[E]very kind of pictorial representation, be it on boards or in wall-mosaics or on holy vessels or altar-cloths, or anything else of the sort that is found in all Christian churches, should be obliterated and entirely destroyed; not only these, but also all the effigies that are set up as decoration in the marketplaces of cities.⁶

Yazid reportedly sent out emissaries to pull down the holy icons and other images, unsparingly denuding God’s churches. According to John:

Since the God-fearing Christians took to flight so as not to destroy holy icons with their own hands, the Emirs who had been charged with this task imposed it on accursed Jews and miserable Arabs. And so they burned the holy icons, and some churches they whitewashed, while others they scraped down.

046

When Yazid died a few years later, according to John’s account, the images were restored to their original position and honor, and Yazid’s son al-Walid ordered the Tiberias sorcerer to be put to death for his false prophecy.

Immediately following this report, the acts of the second Nicaea council record that the bishop of Messana stated: “I, too, was a boy in Syria when the Caliph of the Saracens was destroying images.”

Nonetheless, John’s account of Yazid’s actions is not entirely accurate. For instance, al-Walid was not the successor of Yazid; Hisham reigned for 20 years in between. Also, according to John, Yazid ordered that all images be destroyed and that Arabs and Jews were to carry out the task, as the Christians had fled rather than be compelled to do it themselves. But this literary version of events does not accord with the archaeological evidence. Jews and Arabs did not do the damage. As we have seen, only Christians themselves would have done the careful and elaborate repairs at such churches as Khirbat ‘Asida and Ma‘in. And only Christians would have included a cross and a church building in the repairs to the mosaic at Massuh.

Although scholars have long attributed this eighth-century destruction of images to Yazid II’s edict, the archaeological picture is not so clear. None of the damage to church mosaics in Palestine must be dated to the Umayyad period. The images were destroyed after about 720—that we know. But can we be certain that they were destroyed to comply with Yazid II’s 721 edict?

In 1994, archaeologist Michele Piccirillo introduced new evidence. Excavating a chapel at ‘Ayn al-Kanisah, near Mount Nebo in Jordan, Piccirillo uncovered a mosaic floor with an inscription dating the restoration of the chapel to 762. This restoration was probably made to repair deliberate damage to the pavement—and the damage and repair may well have taken place at the same time. The late date for the damage and repair at ‘Ayn al-Kanisah, 40 years after Yazid’s edict, may suggest that the damage to other churches also continued well into the eighth century. If so, Yazid’s iconoclastic edit probably was not the cause.

The 762 date would place the damage in the early years of the Abbasid Caliphate, which ruled from Baghdad from 750 to 1258. In decorating churches built at this time, mosaicists chose to use purely geometric designs rather than the representational images offensive to their Muslim rulers. Such non-pictorial designs were used at Umm al-Rasas in the apse mosaic in the Church of Saint Stephen, dedicated in March 756, as well as in the 047Church of the Virgin in Madaba, dedicated in 767.⁷

That the camouflaging of images in Christian churches was done later—after the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads—finds some support in the theological writings of Christian authors during the early Abbasid period.⁸ Some Syria-Palestine Christians were concerned because Muslims and Jews accused them of idolatrous veneration of icons. Shortly after 800 Theodore Abu Qurrah, a Chalcedonian bishop in northern Syria, wrote a tract urging Christians in Muslim-ruled Syria not to abandon the veneration of icons because of charges of idolatry from their Muslim and Jewish neighbors.

Thus the Christians who carried out the damage and repairs in Palestine may well have done so under duress. Probably, Muslim officials demanded that images be destroyed, and the Christians then camouflaged the images themselves to do as little damage as possible. Although almost every church was affected, the damage in no case was very thorough. Some images were simply scrambled, while other images were left intact.

This suggests that the Muslims themselves were not very ardent image-destroyers. It looks as though both communities, Muslim and Christian, wanted to cause as little resentment as possible while remaining faithful to their religious precepts—the Muslims by making minimal demands, the Christians by getting rid of some offensive images.

A curious episode in the history of iconoclasm—the destruction of sacred images—took place in eighth-century Palestine (present-day Israel and Jordan). The region’s Byzantine churches were often decorated with colorful mosaic pavements, including depictions of plants, animals, ordinary human beings and holy figures such as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the disciples and saints. Sometime during the eighth century, however, in almost every one of these churches, the human and animal images were deliberately annihilated.1 But it was a gentle destruction: Those who obliterated the images typically removed the tiles with great care, scrambled them up, and reinserted them into the […]