This new style became a vogue in the ninth century; broadly contemporary wooden panels with beveled ornament are also known from Egypt and Syria, while designs comparable to style C stucco also appear on portable media including glass, rock crystal, and ceramics, both glazed and unglazed (e.g., the bevel-cut glass illustrated in Carboni and Whitehouse 2 0 0 1: 1 7 1 1 9 3, nos. 7 7 9 8 ). These styles appear to be most common in regions with a connection to Abbasid Iraq and are hardly encountered in Umayyad Spain.

Economic considerations are of more direct relevance when looking at the distribution of the different decorative media across Samarra. Predictably, imported hardwoods and marble are encountered only in restricted contexts, such as the congregational mosques and the quarters of the palaces occupied by the caliph and his family. High costs of manufacture also limited the use of luster-painted tiles and mosaic. The difficulty of procuring large volumes of fuel, for example, in the form of brushwood, partially explains the widespread preference for mud brick and pis over baked brick as a building material. Baked brick was reserved for the religious buildings and the most architecturally ambitious sections of palaces; not surprisingly these are the few structures that remain above ground level.

The provision of human resources also had an impact on the character of the architecture and decoration in Samarra. Many buildings, particularly those made principally of mud brick or pise, could have been constructed with large teams of unskilled manpower soldiers, prisoners, slaves, and agricultural laborers but trained artisans were required for the manufacture of baked brick and the addition of decorative media onto walls, floors, and vaults. The demand for wood carvers, tilemakers, mosaicists, stucco workers, and masons evidently exceeded the capacity of the craft sector of Iraq; al-Mu'tasim is known to have sent to the governors of his provinces for skilled workmen in the early years of the construction (Ya'qubi, translated in Northedge 2005a: 268, 271). It is conceivable that the interactions between the artisans and craft practices from different parts of the Islamic world contributed to the pace of artistic change and the degree of stylistic diversity.

Samarra and Abbasid Ornament Architectural Ornament in Late Antiquity and Early Islam