纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 052后宫壁画残片（3）（在线收听）

"It's a closed society; few people ventured within its walls, and it's been said that when a pious Muslim was summoned to see the caliph, he took with him his shroud. Ordinary people rather feared what went on within the walls of the caliph's palaces, and I say 'palaces' advisedly - the Abbasid caliphs seem to have had rather a 'Kleenex' attitude towards their palaces, once they had used one up they went and built another, and then abandoned it. So you get a succession of palaces, one after another, in Baghdad, which are built, are magnificent, and then are dropped in favour of a new site, and then of course, they moved to Samarra where they do the same thing."

Most of the Abbasid palaces, both in Baghdad and in the new capital Samarra, are now in ruins. But some elements survive.

In front of me, I've got a few fragments of painted plaster - they come from the harem quarters of an Abbasid caliph. The harem is, of course, where the caliphs' women were kept, and for me these fragments have more magic than any movie could have. They're haunting glances across the centuries, and they could themselves inspire 1001 stories.

The little portraits that I've got here are all of women, although some believe that some of these show boys as well, and they're fragments of larger wall paintings. They link us directly to medieval Iraq. In Baghdad itself hardly anything architectural survives from this great age of glory around 800 AD, because the city was later destroyed by Genghis Khan. But luckily we can still get quite a good idea of what the Abbasid court looked like, because for almost 60 years, its capital was moved 70 miles (110 km) north to a brand new city called Samarra. And luckily, a lot of ancient Samarra survives, that lets us get much closer to this empire that dominated so much of the globe, 1,200 years ago.