Ozymandias Syndrome

Robert Irwin

• Islamic Architecture by Robert Hillenbrand
  Edinburgh, 645 pp, £49.50, November 1994, ISBN 0 7486 0479 0
• The Art and Architecture of Islam 1250-1800 by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom
  Yale, 348 pp, £45.00, August 1994, ISBN 0 300 05888 8
• The Mosque: History, Architectural Development and Regional Diversity edited by Martin Frishman and Hassan-Uddin Khan
  Thames and Hudson, 288 pp, £36.00, November 1994, ISBN 0 500 34133 8
• Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey by Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby
  Alexandria Press/Laurence King, 384 pp, £60.00, July 1994, ISBN 1 85669 054 7

‘Je vous salue, ruines solitaires, tombeaux saints, murs silencieux!’ In 1782, Constantin-François Chassebeuf, alias Volney, travelled through Egypt and Syria. Everywhere he was struck by the contrast between the region’s present misery and the architectural evidence of its former wealth and grandeur. It was while meditating in the ghost city of Palmyra that he was inspired by the spirit of the place to write Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), a treatise in which reflections on the moral causes of the downfall of ancient Oriental despotisms led on to a declaration of faith in progress and the principles of the French Revolution. Eastern palaces had been transformed into graveyards and, in Volney’s little book, ruins became teaching aids in a series of lectures on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny.