The palace at Khirbat al-Mafjar is a large complex comprising three main architectural elements: the mosque, the palace, and the bath house or audience hall. These are all set within a large enclosure entered by a main gateway in the outer enclosure wall. This gateway projects outwards from the enclosure wall and is set between two quarter-circular solid buttress towers. The Umayyad desert palaces in Palestine, Jordan and Syria, such as Khirbat al-Mafjar in Palestine, built in the second quarter of the 8th century, were filled with both fresco paintings depicting human beings and of stucco and stone sculpture, in the round, of people. This palace contained a large statue of an Umayyad Caliph standing on lions, either Hisham who ruled from 724-43 or his successor the Caliph al-Walid II (743-44).

The Audience hall of Khirbat al-Mafjar, Palestine, 2nd quarter of the 8th century. The audience hall, next to the bath house, was a highly organized building. It had its own entry building. The reception room, which also served as a concert hall, was surrounded by rooms with cupolas and vaulted rooms. A room at the side functioned as a place for the caliph to receive quests.

Clearly in the 8th century there was no confusion between a statue of a Caliph and an idol, nor any question of idolatry, in the minds of the sculptor, the Caliph or the visitors to this palace. There were also numerous statues of freestanding sculptures of dancing girls and also human figures in high relief as part of the interior architectural decoration of the audience hall of the palace and in the bath house. All these statues of human figures were painted in a lifelike manner. Likewise at the palace Qasr al-Hayr west in Syria, from the same period, there were found statues of humans including a fragmentary one of a seated princess and what seems to have been her maid of honor, standing beside her. Given this evidence, there is no reason to suppose that the Umayyad and later Abbasid palaces, in cities such as Damascus, Baghdad and Samara, the Caliph capital from 836-92, were without their similar complement of lifelike painted statues, of Caliphs and servants of various rank. This deduction is supported by later surviving sculptural evidence and by the records of human statues from later Abbasid, Ghaznavids and Seljuks palaces.
 

Khumarawayh 884-96, the son and successor of Ahmed ibn Tulun 868-84 a Turkish Mamluk who founded the Tulunids dynasty in Egypt, built a pavilion in his palace garden in Fostat which held a massive painted wooden statues of himself & his concubines & singing girls. These wooden statues were dressed in real clothes and carried real gold Jewelry. He also decorated the walls of his palace with solid gold relief's of himself, his wife and songstresses, in addition and he had a pool filled with mercury in his palace on which he floated on a leather air bed which was tied with ornate ropes to silver columns beside this pool.
 

An unusual mosaic floor was found in a room ending in an apse in the bath house precinct of the palace. It shows a fruit tree: on one side of the tree, two gazelles beneath its branches are nibbling leaves, while a lion is killing a gazelle on the other side. To understand its meaning, we may imagine the caliph enthroned above the tree: the uninjured gazelles are shown beneath his right hand, the injured gazelle beneath his left hand. These scenes have been interpreted as showing the world of peace and the world of war.  The design of the tree, with the different colors used in its leaves, trunk, and branches, is reminiscent of the trees in the mosaic of The Great Mosque of Damascus. The same room contained a copy of the caliph's headdress hanging from the ceiling by a stone chain, in imitation of the crown of the Sassanian king Khusraw in the palace of Ctesiphon, the capital of his Empire.
 

The historian Abu al Hassan 'Ali al Masudi recounts; In 896 a large brass statue of a Hindu Goddess, brought to Baghdad was exhibited on certain days to the population of Baghdad, drawing large crowds. It seems evident that without the intent to worship, statues, of themselves, even those of goddesses, were not defaced or smashed but were instead regarded with interest by the population in the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. It is recorded that the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtedar (908-32) had sculptures of 30 life sized horsemen in his palace, which were dressed in brocade and armed with lances. They were arranged in the "Hall of the Tree" or Dar al-Shajarah which probably took the form of an arched iwan, and they stood, 15 on opposite side of a tank from which grew a tree made of gold and silver with 18 branches.

The horsemen were constantly moving through some device, as if in combat and with the reflections from the water, or perhaps mercury in the tank, as in the later Artukid palace pool at Diyarbaker, this must have been a truly marvelous sight. Life sized sculptures of soldiers and court officials placed in the audience hall or painted on the walls of the halls of palaces in the later Ghaznavids and Seljuks periods may have been influenced by these armed horsemen in the Caliph's palace in 10th century Baghdad.
 

The "Book of Knowledge of ingenious mechanical devices" was written by Badi al Zaman Isma'il ibn Razza Abu'l-Izz al-Jaziri, late in the 12th century, in Artukid Diyarbaker (Amid). It was copied many times for various courts and today there survive 15 hand written and illuminated copies. In the copy of this book made by Muhammad ibn Ahmal al-Izmiri for the Egyptian Mamluke Sultan al-Malik al-Salih (1351-54) there is a miniature, which, like the 1205 copy made in Diyarbaker, shows a depiction of an automata which is thought to represent the most famous of all Abbasid statues, of a massive size horseman, on public display from the late 9th to the mid 10th century to all the inhabitants of Baghdad.

The Caliphal city of Baghdad was founded by the Caliph al-Mansur (754-75) in 762 and the round, inner city was built by 100,000 laborers and architects. This statue stood in the very center of this round city, on top of the cupola of the green dome, "al-Qubbat al-Khadra" which surmounted the Golden Gate, "Bab al-dhahab," later called the House of the Caliph or "Dar al-Khalifah," which was the Caliph's own palace in Baghdad. The Golden Gate stood in total 40 meters high, in the center of the inner city of Baghdad, home of the Caliph, on top of which was a statue of a horseman. The statue of the horseman was destroyed in a storm in 941.
 

It is also reported that each of the main gates to the capital city of the Caliphate: to the north-east the Khurasan gate, to the South-East the Basra gate, to the South-West the Kufah gate and to the North-West the Sham (Damascus) gate, had domed gateways, on top of each of which was a figure which moved in the wind. It was later said that the horseman on top of the Caliph's palace indicated the direction of danger to the Abbasid state by the direction of his lance, but it seems rather to have been an impressive and splendid sculpted wind vane. These large human statues on the major gateways and above the Abbasid Caliph's palace itself, provide us with clear evidence that there was no official rejection of large scale human figural sculpture in the heart of the Abbasid Caliphate, not until after the Mongol invasion and the destruction of Baghdad in 1258.