When al Mu‘awiyah in A.D. 661 became Caliph in Damascus, and founded there a line of rulers addicted by policy and temperament to architectural enterprise and reliant in many spheres on the talents and support of a Syrian population, the building trades of Syria, which had enjoyed but desultory employment since the busy years of Justinian, were quickened to a new and fecund term of life.

Several buildings created in the ensuing century have survived in part: at Damascus al Walid's mosque; in Jerusalem the Ṣakhrah and a part of the Aqṣa mosque; on the fringes of the Syrian desert and in the Jordan valley the ruins of at least a dozen desert palaces and baths. It is no surprise to find in these buildings, in their ashlar and timber construction, their arcaded columns, their mosaics and marble revetments, and in many features of their plans, a perpetuation of well-established Syrian traditions, the accumulated inheritance of Phoenician, Aramaean and Hellenized Christian societies over the two thousand years preceding the Arab conquest.

The traditional aspect of Umayyad architecture is self-explanatory. What is more curious historically is the intrusion into its Syrian environment of structural and decorative processes (like brick vaulting, stucco revetments, or various new ways of drawing things) which can be shown to be of foreign devising, now for the first time admitted into the main current of Syrian architecture.