Quseir Amra

Frescoes of hunters, musicians, bathers and a domed map of the night sky cover the walls of Quseir Amra, a small Umayyad bath-house and residence standing alone in Jordan's eastern desert. Raised in the early 700s for the caliphs' pleasure, its murals preserve a startlingly worldly side of early Islamic court culture. UNESCO inscribed the desert castle in 1985, one of Jordan's first World Heritage sites, prized for wall paintings with few equals from that age.