English: In "Arabs, A 3,000 year history of peoples, tribes and empires" by Tim Macintosh-Smith this Umayyad desert palace is described, it is mentioned it stems from the first half of the 8th century. And “The mural paintings are labelled in both Arabic and Greek; they show not only the allegorical figures of History, Poetry, Philosophy and Victory, but also the emperors of Byzantium an Abyssinia, the long defunct shah of Persia, and the very recently defeated Roderick, King of the Visigoths in Spain. […] Qusayr Amrah is a man-made oasis in which to banquet and bathe while hunting. But it also acts as a kind of camera obscura, for it projects a panorama of the Arab empire in the process of headlong expansion, and shows how Arabs were now members, under heaven, of the international club of kings and cultures past and present.”