Heritage · Landmark
HISHAM’S PALACE: History, Attractions & Visitor Guide
HISHAM’S PALACE is a historic and cultural icon known for its significance and beauty. Explore its history, key attractions, and visitor information.Written to last — not to trend.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-07-20 · 7-minute readQuiet tools, not a toolbar.
Hisham's Palace, known to archaeologists as Khirbat al-Mafjar, is an unfinished early Islamic estate on the floor of the Jordan Valley, about 3 kilometres (2 miles) north of Jericho in the West Bank. It was built in the first half of the 8th century, during the Umayyad caliphate, and belongs to a family of rural retreats that the ruling dynasty raised across the semi-arid margins of Greater Syria. The complex set a fortified residence beside a mosque, an ornamental forecourt, and an unusually elaborate bath hall, all supplied by spring water carried across the valley by aqueduct.
The site is best known for two things. The first is its floor mosaics, among the largest continuous ancient mosaic surfaces surviving anywhere in the region. The second is a single figurative panel, set in a private reception room off the baths, that is usually called the Tree of Life. The palace was wrecked by an earthquake around the year 749, apparently before it was finished, and it lay in ruins for roughly twelve centuries. Excavation under the British Mandate, and later an international conservation programme, have turned it into one of the most studied and most visited archaeological parks in Palestine.
Khirbat al-Mafjar is one of the so-called desert castles, a scattered group of Umayyad rural estates built in the countryside of what are now Jordan, Syria, Israel, and the West Bank. These were not defensive forts in any real sense. They combined a walled residence with baths, farmland, and irrigation works, and they gave the caliphs and princes of the dynasty a place to hunt, entertain, and hold court away from the cities of Damascus and its province.
Who ordered the palace is still debated. A potsherd inscribed with the name Hisham has long linked the site to Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, who ruled from 724 to 743, and it is from him that the popular name "Hisham's Palace" derives. Robert Hamilton, who excavated and published the site, argued instead that its patron was al-Walid ibn Yazid, Hisham's nephew and short-lived successor, known as al-Walid II. Many later scholars have found that attribution persuasive, in part because the extravagant, pleasure-directed decoration fits what the sources record of al-Walid's tastes. Al-Walid II was a poet who kept company with musicians and dancers in the desert palaces, and his reign lasted little more than a year, from 743 until he was killed in 744.
Function followed patronage. The estate seems to have been used as a winter and spring retreat, when the warm floor of the Jordan Valley is at its most comfortable and the surrounding land can be farmed and hunted. Britannica describes the great bath hall not as a place of washing so much as a hall for entertainment, with music and dancing, a reading supported by the frankly secular imagery of its stucco and mosaics.
The building programme was never completed. An earthquake, traditionally identified as the powerful Galilee quake of around 749 that also damaged churches in Jerusalem, brought down the vaults and much of the standing structure. Recent archaeological work has complicated this account. Renewed study of the pottery and stratigraphy suggests that occupation continued at the site into the Abbasid and Fatimid periods, and some researchers now argue that the decisive destruction came with a later earthquake in 1033 rather than in 749. Either way, the palace was eventually abandoned, and over the centuries villagers carried off its dressed stone to build in Jericho, leaving the mounded ruins that gave the site its Arabic name, khirba, meaning a ruin.
Khirbat al-Mafjar was laid out as three connected parts: the palace proper, a congregational element with a mosque, and the bath complex, with an ornamental forecourt tying them together. Water reached the estate from springs to the north through an aqueduct, and the same system supported gardens and agriculture in the surrounding land.
The palace itself is a two-storey square building with round towers at its corners, arranged around a central courtyard ringed by a portico, or riwaq. Beneath part of it ran a sirdab, an underground vaulted room that stayed cool in the valley heat. A small mosque with a mihrab occupied one side of the ground floor. In its plan the residence looks conventional for an Umayyad qasr; the ambition of the site lies elsewhere.
That ambition is concentrated in the forecourt and the baths. The forecourt held a fountain pavilion, and it is here that excavators recovered the carved stone rosette, a six-pointed star pierced through a circular window frame, that has since become an emblem of the city of Jericho. Around it stood some of the richest architectural sculpture of the early Islamic world, worked in carved and moulded stucco: floral and geometric panels, and human and animal figures including athletes, women, birds, and grazing animals. A standing stucco figure often identified as the caliph himself once presided over the entrance, set above a pair of lions. Much of this fragile decoration did not survive in place, and the surviving stone sculpture and stucco relief are now held at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem.
The bath hall is the centrepiece. It is a great square room, roughly 30 metres on a side, once roofed by a central dome carried on sixteen piers, with apses, or exedrae, opening off its sides. Small heated bathing rooms adjoining it used a hypocaust system, in which hot air circulated beneath a raised floor. But the hall was more than a bathhouse. Its floor is paved with one continuous mosaic carpet, made up of thirty-eight separate panels of geometric and floral design, and it counts among the largest ancient mosaic floors known in the region. The pavement covers roughly 827 square metres and is composed of more than five million individual tesserae, cut from local stone in a range of natural colours. The scale, the state of preservation, and the variety of the patterns make it one of the defining monuments of Umayyad art.
The single most famous image at Khirbat al-Mafjar is not part of the great geometric carpet but a small figurative panel set apart from it. It paves the floor of the diwan, a private reception room, or audience chamber, in the north-western corner of the bath complex, raised within a semicircular apse.
The scene is compact and carefully balanced. A large fruiting tree, its branches heavy with what look like quinces or apples, rises at the centre. On the left of the trunk two gazelles graze quietly beneath the boughs. On the right a lion springs onto the back of a third gazelle and brings it down. The palette is rich, and the modelling of the animals, with shading that suggests muscle and movement, shows the confidence of a first-rate workshop.
Its meaning has been read in several ways. A common interpretation sees the panel as an image of power and its opposite: peace on one side of the tree, represented by the untroubled gazelles, and violence or dominion on the other, embodied in the lion, sometimes taken as a symbol of the ruler's authority. Others read it more simply as a hunting or paradise scene of the kind that recurs across late antique and early Islamic art, where fruiting trees and paired animals evoke abundance. Whatever the intended message, the panel drew on a long Mediterranean tradition of figural mosaic and adapted it to an Umayyad setting. It remains in place at the site and, like the star window, has become one of the visual signatures of Jericho.
The ruins were first cleared and studied in a sustained way under the British Mandate. Between 1935 and 1948 the Palestinian Department of Antiquities excavated the site under the direction of Dimitri Baramki and Robert Hamilton, whose campaigns uncovered the palace, the mosque, and the bath hall with its mosaics and sculpture. Hamilton's later monograph on Khirbat al-Mafjar remains the standard record of that work, and the movable finds entered the collection of the Rockefeller Museum. Further excavation followed in the late 1950s and 1960s under the Jordanian archaeologist Awni Dajani.
Research resumed in 2006, sixty years after the Mandate-era digs, as the Jericho Mafjar Project, a collaboration between the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, directed by Hamdan Taha, and archaeologists from the University of Chicago led by Donald Whitcomb. Renewed excavation in the northern part of the site revealed a north gate matching the known southern one, evidence that the estate was planned as a coherent whole. This work has advanced the argument that Khirbat al-Mafjar was not only a palace but the beginnings of a small early Islamic settlement.
Conservation has run alongside the archaeology. A programme begun in 1996, with Italian and UNESCO involvement, restored the mosaic of the sirdab. The largest intervention came later and focused on the bath-hall pavement, whose exposure to sun, rain, and visitors' feet had left it vulnerable. Under an agreement with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Palestinian and Japanese specialists undertook a multi-year project to conserve the floor and build a permanent shelter over it. To mark the start of the works, the full mosaic carpet was uncovered for a single day on 20 October 2016 so the public could see it, before it was reburied under protective sand for the duration of the construction. The conservation and its sheltering canopy, at a reported cost of around twelve million US dollars, were completed and the pavement opened to permanent public view in 2021.
Formal recognition has followed. Hisham's Palace was added to the UNESCO Tentative List for Palestine in 2020, a first step toward possible inscription as a World Heritage Site, on the grounds of its value as a monument of early Islamic art and architecture.
The site is managed by the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and is open to visitors as an archaeological park. It sits a short drive north of central Jericho, off the road toward the Jordan River, and a visitor centre and small museum help interpret the ruins and display finds from the excavations. The main draws are the sheltered bath-hall mosaic, now viewable from raised walkways, the Tree of Life panel, and casts and fragments of the carved stucco and the star window.
Opening hours and admission fees are set locally and change from season to season, so it is best to confirm current details through the Palestinian tourism authorities or a Jericho tour operator before travelling. Much of the site is open ground with uneven ancient surfaces, and the valley can be very hot from late spring through early autumn, which makes early morning or late afternoon the most comfortable times to walk the ruins and the best light for the mosaics.
Hisham's Palace is easy to combine with Jericho's other landmarks. The most significant neighbour is Tell es-Sultan, the mound of ancient Jericho, one of the oldest continuously settled places on earth, which was inscribed as the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan" in 2023. The Mount of Temptation and its monastery, reached by cable car, and the springs and orchards of the oasis are also close at hand, so the palace usually forms one stop on a wider day around the town.
History
The palace complex and the mosaics
The Tree of Life
Excavation and preservation
Visiting
References and resources
- Hisham's Palace, Wikipedia: overview of the history, attribution debate, and layout, with references.
- Khirbat al-Mafjar, Encyclopaedia Britannica: concise scholarly summary of the palace and its bath hall.
- Hisham's Palace / Khirbet al-Mafjar, UNESCO Tentative List: the 2020 nomination file setting out the site's significance.
- The Palace in the Desert, Current World Archaeology: feature article on the architecture, decoration, and excavation history.
- Repairing Palestine's historic mosaics, Al Jazeera: photo report on the 2016 unveiling and the JICA-funded conservation.
- Inside Hisham's Palace, Middle East Eye: illustrated tour of the ruins and their sculpture.
- Khirbat al-Mafjar, World History Encyclopedia: background on the Umayyad context and the bath complex.
- Jericho Mafjar Project, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures: the University of Chicago and Palestinian excavation project since 2006.
- Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan, UNESCO World Heritage Centre: the neighbouring World Heritage Site inscribed in 2023.