- Period
- Ayyubid, c. 1200
- Location
- Inside the entrance turns
- Motifs
- Lions; serpents biting their tails
- State
- In place
Set into the walls at the turns of the entrance passage are carvings you pass within arm's reach. On one doorway, lions — the straightforward emblem of royal power, and the animal every medieval visitor would read without instruction.
On another, something stranger: serpents, or dragons, curved round and biting their own tails. The closed loop is not decoration. It is a boundary mark, a line drawn around ground that is protected, and it belongs to a much older Near Eastern habit of putting guardian creatures at thresholds.
Which is the point. This is a thirteenth-century Muslim fortress carrying, at its door, an idea about guarded thresholds that the mound had already been practising for three thousand years.