Decorated walls, description, and cultural memory : between Byzantium, Persia, and early Islam

While very few wall mosaics or paintings from the early Byzantine buildings of the eastern Mediterranean survive, texts describing them help supplement the material corpus. Two ninth-century texts that have been omitted from discussions of decorated walls, al-Buh. turī's Arabic poem "Īwān Kisrā" and the Greek Letter of the Three Patriarchs, can expand our idea of what kinds of images Byzantine, Persian, and later Umayyad and Abbasid viewers might have seen in their spaces of worship and rule. These descriptions of what were likely mosaics in the Sasanian palace at Ctesiphon and the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem showcase the potency of wall mosaics, enabling viewers from different societies to communicate and even shape their cultural and religious identities when encountering images from other traditions. The presence of mosaics in these two texts encourages us to widen our view of the audiences of Byzantine, Sasanian, and early Islamic works of monumental art.