Word: umayyad
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...this is water, whose conspicuous display and consumption is as important a sign of luxury, of control over Nature, to Vegas entrepreneurs as it was to the Umayyad caliphs who began building the fountains of the Alhambra on a dry hillside near Granada 12 centuries ago. Nobody grasps this better than Wynn. To install performing dolphins in huge saltwater tanks in a hotel in the Nevada desert seems, on the face of it, about as rational as filling a cruise ship with sand and camels, but it has its own value as spectacle. And nowhere in Vegas is water...
...heart of old Damascus sits the filigreed stone tomb of Saladin, the 12th century sultan who ruled an empire stretching from Cairo to Baghdad. Worshipers bound for the gleaming Umayyad mosque pass by without pausing, and children scamper in a nearby courtyard oblivious of his presence. Yet as the premier potentate of the region, the conqueror of Jerusalem and the fearless warrior who helped crush the Crusaders, Saladin united a divided region and set off a burst of pride among his people that glowed for centuries...
Over the millenniums, Syria has repeatedly been overrun by conquerors from the desert or the sea: Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Aramaeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Byzantines, Arabs. During the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., Damascus flourished as the capital of the Umayyad Empire, which stretched from Spain to India. In the 12th century the Crusaders' brief reign came to a violent end at the hands of the warrior Saladin, who remains a Syrian folk hero to this day. After Saladin's death, his domain fell...
...Kissinger showed a genuine interest in archaeological and religious sites. In Damascus, she visited the ancient Umayyad mosque and the Turkish baths. There she startled her conservative Muslim guide by asking whether men and women had ever bathed there together. The horrified guide said, "Oh, no, no!" He then added that women had been allowed to bathe but separately. In Israel, she toured the fortress at Masada where Jewish zealots made a suicidal last stand against the Roman Legion in A.D. 73. Later she helicoptered to the ruins of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. Near the site, she chatted...