Jordan - Al Qastal (Settlement)

An Umayyad, 25 kilometres south of the Capital d complex (settlement) at the modern village of Qastal (Amman) and 100 metres west of the airport Highway .It is one of the oldest and most complete Umayyad provincial communities in the Near East. It retains nearly all the structures that comprised a typical Umayyad settlement: a main residential palace, a mosque, a cemetery, a bathhouse, domestic dwellings, a substantial agricultural dam, a main reservoir and dozens of smaller cisterns. Qastal had always been viewed as a small Roman fort, largely because of its fort-like shape and the assumption that its Arabic name Qastal derived from the Latin word "castellum", or small castle. Surface examinations by the German scholar Heinz Gaube and excavations by a French team headed by Dr Patricia Carlier and Frederic Morin have shown Qastal to be a virtually complete Umayyad complex, with the standing remains of what may be the earliest known Umayyad residential palace and minareted mosque. The palace, nearly 68 metres square, had its main entrance hall, decorated with fine carved stonework, in a tower in the east wall. The palace had four circular corner towers and 12 semi-circular interval towers.