Remnants of an Ancient Gateway

 

From the bazaar of the goldsmiths we have now found our way into that of the booksellers. Copies of the Qurʾān, beautifully illuminated, were occasionally found in the shops, but in these days a good manuscript copy can only be obtained secretly and by paying a high price for it. The magic energy of the printing-press will ere long altogether supersede the laborious methods of the copyist, and even now but few manuscript books of special value are exposed for sale in these stalls. Here is another side-door, which the same amount of bakhshish will unlock, and from the terrace of this private house we can examine the remains of an ancient gateway in front of the western entrance to the Great Mosque. Those four massive columns are all that can be seen of it here in the street.

What we now see rising above the roof of the bazaar is a portion of the arch and pediment of the gateway, supported by three columns with Corinthian capitals. The one at the end is composed of a square pier of masonry, with a semi-column on the inner and outer side. The cornice, arch, and pediment are profusely ornamented with scroll-work, flowers and foliage, and other architectural designs similar to those seen among the ruins at Baalbek. In the masonry over the cornice there is a small window with a double moulding, and, judging from the proportions of this elaborate fragment, the entire gateway must have been more than seventy feet high and of about the same width. Let us descend and walk through the booksellers' bazaar to Bāb al-Barīd, at the end of the street. The double colonnade which formerly extended from this ancient portal to the mosque has been almost entirely destroyed, and only a few of the columns remain; some of them are built into the walls of the shops and houses along the street.

Here we are at this unpretentious entrance to the mosque, and the custodians have brought the slippers we are required to wear within the sacred edifice. On former visits I had to purchase slippers in the shoemakers' bazaar, but the keepers have become more accommodating, expecting to be liberally rewarded for their polite attentions when we leave the mosque.

William McClure Thomson, The Land and the Book, Vol. III, Lebanon, Damascus, and Beyond Jordan. Harper1886 (p. 378-379).