纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 052后宫壁画残片（7）（在线收听）

And this story from the Arabian Nights is true. Al-Mutawakkil was murdered by his Turkish commanders in 861, and his death was the beginning of the end for Samarra as a capital. Within a decade, the army had left the city, and Baghdad resumed its status as capital, leaving the palace at Samarra as a decaying ghost. The court lions were put down, and the slave girls and singers of our portraits were dispersed. The last coin to be struck in Samarra is dated 892.

Samarra was built at the end of the heroic days of the Abbasids but, in a sense, it is a monument to their political failure. The tensions that led to the assassination of al-Mutawakkil ultimately led to the fragmentation of the empire. A poet, exiled in the now decaying Samarra, mused elegiacally on its decline:

"My acquaintance with it, when it was peopled and joyous,

was heedless of the disasters of Time and its calamities.

There lions of a realm strutted

Around a crowned Imam;

Then his Turks turned treacherous - and they were transformed

Into owls, crying of loss and destruction."

Samarra was the capital of a world empire for less than 50 years, but it is still a significant place of pilgrimage in the world of Shi'a Islam, for it's the burial place of two of the great imams. But modern Samarra also has a tragic history. In 2006 the great dome of the famous al-Askari mosque was destroyed by bombs. A year later, the archaeological ruins of the ancient city, which include the Great Mosque with its famous spiral minaret, were recognised and protected as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The anonymous faces of the girls and boys of Samarra were never meant to be viewed by anyone other than the familiars of a caliph. They have survived as a rare record of the people of the Abbasid age, and they now remain to look at us, as we look at them. Ironically, and rather wonderfully, instead of the images of the grand caliphs who built Samarra, we see their slaves and their servants - restored from Hollywood cartoon caricature to moving historical reality.