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Earthen Domes and Habitats
stringer courses: this is especially visible on photographs of towers (Fig. 2). Some architectural characteristics, derived from the use of basalt, are similar to those found in Southern Syria (the Hauran), and therefore deserve to be examined more closely. In those buildings entirely made of basalt, several transverse arches and vaults, built in order to support roofs, can be observed in houses and towers; these vaults divide the length of rooms. Basalt slabs, laid perpendicularly to the axis of arches, are used to create the ground floor of the upper level. In the Jebel al-Hass and the Jebel Shbeyt, however, very few buildings have been shown to be exclusively made of basalt: this is true in the case of a few churches (for instance, those of Zebed), towers and other atypical constructions. The features characteristic of the Jebel al-‘Ala, such as those present in the Byzantine constructions of Southern Syria, can, nevertheless, be traced in the few basalt constructions of those tablelands: such is the case of the At-Tuba warehouse, the Rasm al-Hajal basalt building. According to another technique, corbels were also used to support the long basalt slabs of roofs or intermediate floors (for instance at Al-Burj tower). Otherwise, in the two eastern basalt plateaus, mud brick was the common construction material. In this area, mud-brick walls were raised on a foundation made of available stone, i.e., once more in this region, basalt. This short foundation could be built of pebbles or roughly squared stones, and would have preserved mud-brick walls from moisture. A general, but not exclusive, form of roofing in these jebels was a mud-brick dome, the length and width of rooms being specially designed to adapt to this feature, as with the mud-brick domes we may observe today in the region. Nevertheless, basalt buildings appear to have been mostly covered with a frame and roofed with tiles. Some mud-brick constructions (including churches and houses) seem to have been roofed in the same way, but the ratio between the mud-brick buildings covered with mud-brick dome and those covered with frame and tiles is not known. Fired bricks do not seem to exist in the Jebel al-‘Ala, whereas one can find some buildings made of this material in the easternmost mesas. Scattered in a region between the Jebel al-Hass and the Jebel Shbeyt, they seem to be confined to large settlements, and appear to be slightly more frequent than one would expect. During the last survey, I recorded three of those constructions in the village of Rasm ar-Rbeyt, on the foothills of Jebel al-Hass, and one at Rasm al-Hajal, on the eastern side of Jebel Shbeyt. Brickwork was
Fig. 2: Tamak tower (Butler 1920, fig. 8)
Fig. 3: Traditional architecture: mud-brick dome on basalt foundations at Rasm al-Hajal Fig. 4: Rasm al-Hajal’s baths: baked-brick masonry on a basalt base