In Iraq, northern Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt (after 1171), the architectural monuments do not, on the whole, appear as overwhelmingly impressive as those of Iran, largely because the taste of Umayyad and Abbasid times continued to dominate mosque architecture. It is in the construction of new building types, particularly the madrasah, that the most originality is apparent. The Syrian madrasahs in Damascus, like Al-ʿĀdiliyyah, Al-Ẓāhiriyyah, or the works of Nureddin, tended also to follow a comparatively standardized plan: an elaborate facade led into a domed hallway and then into a court with at least one eyvān. Most of those madrasahs were small and were fitted into a preexisting urban pattern. The use of eyvāns and the construction of the many minarets found in Mosul or on the Euphrates certainly attest to the influence of Iranian Seljuq design.

The main achievement of Ayyūbid, Zangid, or Seljuq architecture in the Fertile Crescent was the translating into stone of new structural systems first developed in brick. The most impressive instance of this lies in the technically complex muqarnas domes and half domes or in the muqarnas pendentives of Syrian buildings. Elaborate mihrabs were also made of multicoloured stones that were carefully cut to create impressive patterns. The architecture of the Fertile Crescent, therefore, was still dominated by the sheer force of stone as a material for both construction and decoration, and, therefore, the architecture was more Mediterranean in effect than were the buildings of Iran.

This Mediterranean tendency was also evident in the 13th-century architecture of Seljuq Anatolia. This new province of Islam was rapidly populated with new immigrants and consequently gathered themes and motifs from throughout the Muslim world, as well as from the several native Anatolian traditions of Byzantine, Armenian, and Georgian architecture. The resulting assimilation of styles produced an overwhelmingly original architecture, for each building in Konya, Kayseri, Sivas, Divriği, and Erzurum and on the roads between them is a unique monument.

Functionally, the buildings in Anatolia do not differ from those in other parts of the Muslim world. All the structural forms found in Syria and Iran can be found in Anatolia as well, although they have often been adapted to local materials. Three uniquely Anatolian architectural features, however, can be distinguished. One was limited to Konya at this time but would have an important widespread development later on. As it appears in the Ince or Karatay medreses (madrasahs), it consists of the transformation of the central courtyard into a domed space while maintaining the eyvān. Thus, the centralized aspect of the eyvān plan becomes architecturally explicit. The second feature is the creation of a facade that usually consisted of a high central portal—often framed by two minarets—with an elaborately sculpted decorative composition that extended to two corner towers. The third distinguishing feature of Anatolian Seljuq architecture is the complexity of the types of funerary monuments that were constructed.

From the point of view of construction, most of Anatolian architecture is of stone. In Konya and a number of eastern Anatolian instances, brick was used. Barrel vaults, groin vaults, muqarnas vaults, squinch domes, pendentive domes, and the new pendentive known as Turkish triangle (a transformation of the curved space of the traditional pendentive into a fanlike set of long and narrow triangles built at an angle from each other) were all used by Anatolian builders, thereby initiating the great development of vault construction in Ottoman architecture.

Architectural decoration consisted primarily in the stone sculpture found on the facades of religious and secular buildings. Although influenced by Iran and Syria in many details, most Anatolian themes were original, although some exhibit Armenian and possibly Western influences. The exuberance of Anatolian architectural decoration can perhaps be best demonstrated in the facades of Sivas’s Gök Medrese and of Konya’s Ince Minare. In addition to the traditional geometric, epigraphic, and vegetal motifs, a decorative sculpture in the round or in high relief was created that included many representations of human figures and especially animals. Whether this sculpture is essentially a reflection of the decorative wealth of pre-Islamic monuments in Anatolia or whether it is a vestige of a pagan Turkish art that originated in Central Asia is still an unsolved historical problem.

There are few examples of wall painting from Anatolia. Especially in Konya, however, a major art of painted-tile decoration did evolve, possibly developed by Iranian artists who fled from the Mongol onslaught.

In summing up the architectural development of the Seljuq period, three points seem to be particularly significant. One is the expansion of building typology and the erection of new monumental architectural forms, thus illustrating an expansion of patronage and a growing complexity of taste. The second point is that, regardless of the quality and interest of monuments in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Anatolia, the most inventive and exciting architecture in the 11th and 12th centuries was that of Iran. But, far more than in the preceding period, regional needs and regional characteristics seem to predominate over synchronic and pan-Islamic ones. Finally, there was a striking growth of architectural decoration both in sophistication of design and in variation of technique.

Other arts

Although probably not as varied as architecture, the other arts of the Seljuq period also underwent tremendous changes. They demonstrate an extraordinary artistic energy, a widening of the social patronage of the arts, and a hitherto unknown variety of topics and modes of expression. It was as though the Seljuq period was gathering a sort of aesthetic momentum, but that effort seems to have been curtailed by the Mongol invasion. Chronologically, almost all surviving documentation and examples of those arts date from the latter part of the period, after 1150. It is unclear whether this apparent date is merely an accidental result of what has been preserved and is known through later scholarship or whether it corresponds to some precise event or series of events.

Glass and textiles continued to be major mediums during the Seljuq period. Ceramics underwent many changes, especially in Iran, where lustre painting became widespread and where new techniques were developed for colouring pottery. Furthermore, the growth of tile decoration created a new dimension for the art of ceramics.

Inlaid metalwork became an important technique. First produced at Herāt in Iran (now in Afghanistan) in the middle of the 12th century, this type of decoration spread westward, and a series of local schools were established in various regions of the Seljuq domain. In this technique the surfaces of utilitarian metallic objects (candlesticks, ewers, basins, kettles, and so forth) were engraved, and then silver was inlaid in the cut-out areas to make the decorative design more clearly visible.

Manuscript illustration also became an important art. Scientific books, including the medical manuals of Pedanius Dioscorides and of Galen, or literary texts such as the picaresque adventures of a verbal genius known as the Maqāmāt, were produced with narrative illustrations throughout the text.

All the technical novelties of the Seljuqs seem to have had one main purpose: to animate objects and books and to provide them with clearly visible and identifiable images. Even the austere art of calligraphy became occasionally animated with letters ending in human figures. The main centres for producing these arts were located in Iran and the Fertile Crescent. For reasons yet unknown, Egypt and Anatolia were far less involved. One reason may be that those two Seljuq provinces did not witness the same rise of an urban middle class as did Iran, Iraq, and Syria. It would seem from a large number of art objects whose patrons are known that the main market for these works of art was the mercantile bourgeoisie of the big cities and not, as has often been believed, the princes. Seljuq decorative arts and book illustration, therefore, reflect an urban taste.

The themes and motifs used were particularly numerous. In books they tend to be illustrations of the text, even if a manuscript such as the so-called Schefer Maqāmāt (1237; named for the French Orientalist and bibliophile Charles-Henri-Auguste Schefer [1820–98], who once owned it) sought to combine a strict narrative with a fairly naturalistic panorama of contemporary life. Narrative scenes taken from books or reflecting folk stories are also common on Persian ceramics. In all mediums, however, the predominant vocabulary of images is the one provided by the older art of princes, but its meaning is no longer that of illustrating the actual life of princes but rather that of symbolizing a good and happy life. The motifs, therefore, do not have to be taken literally. Next to princely and narrative themes there are depictions of scenes of daily life, astronomical motifs, and a myriad of topics that can be described but not understood.

While it is possible within certain limits to generalize about the subject matter of Seljuq art, regional stylistic definitions tend to be more valid. Thus, the bronzes produced in northeastern Iran in the 12th century are characterized by simple decorative compositions rather than by the very elaborate ones created by the so-called school of Mosul in Iraq during the 13th century. In general, the art of metalwork exhibits a consistently growing intricacy in composition and in details to the point that individual subjects are at times lost in overlapping planes of arabesques. Ceramic pieces of Iran have usually been classified according to a more or less fictitious provenance. Kāshān ware exhibits a perfection of line in the depiction of moon-faced personages with heavily patterned clothes, while Rayy ceramic work is less sophisticated in design and execution but more vividly coloured. Sāveh and Gurgān are still other Iranian varieties of pottery. With the exception of Kāshān ware, where dynasties of ceramicists are known, all these types of Iranian pottery were contemporary with each other. In Syria, Raqqah pottery imitated Iranian ceramic wares but with a far more limited vocabulary of designs.

The main identifiable group of miniature painters is the so-called Baghdad school of the first half of the 13th century. The group should be called the Arab school because the subject matter and style employed could have been identified with any one of the major artistic centres of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, and very little evidence currently exists to limit this school to one city. The miniatures painted by these artists are characterized by the colourful and often humorous way in which the urbanized Arab is depicted. The compositions, often lacking in any strong aesthetic intent, are documentary caricatures in which the artist has recorded the telling and recognizable gesture or a known and common setting or activity. In many images or compositional devices, one can recognize the impact of the richer Christian Mediterranean tradition of manuscript illumination. A greater attention to aesthetic considerations is apparent in the illustrated manuscript of the Persian epic Varqeh o-Golshāh, unique in the Seljuq period.