Spain seeks to decipher Alhambra's inscriptions

April 12, 2009|Associated Press

GRANADA, Spain - From its every nook and cranny, the Alhambra quietly speaks. Walls, columns, fountains and other pieces of Europe's crown jewel of Muslim architecture boast ornate Arabic inscriptions that even native speakers might struggle to decipher.

This month, Spanish researchers unveiled the first fruit of a gargantuan project to translate and catalog every last carving - an estimated 10,000 - from individual words to poems to verses from the Koran. The goal is to render a seemingly impenetrable slice of medieval history readily accessible with the click of a mouse.

"It is hard to believe that this had never been done before," lead researcher Juan Castilla said.

The dream of understanding and recording the inscriptions at the Moorish citadel goes back to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Their forces captured Granada in 1492, expelled the sultans who lived in scented splendor at the 14th-century palace complex and ended nearly 800 years of Muslim rule in much of Spain.

The Spanish royal court quickly hired translators to tackle the inscriptions at the Alhambra and on other buildings throughout this handsome, whitewashed city in southern Spain. But records of that effort were lost over time, and later ones addressed only certain categories of inscription, a far cry from the exhaustive study that Castilla and two other Arabic language specialists have been conducting since 2002.

Today some inscriptions are illegible because of routine decay. And if a natural disaster like an earthquake were to strike Spain's single most visited tourist site, with 2.2 million people a year, the losses would be unfathomable, Castilla said.