ABSTRACT
Ernst Herzfeld, the youngest, most learned and most imaginative scholar of that group, returned to questions about Mshatta more than once, always from a different angle, but ended up by being more concerned with the archaeology of Mshatta and with the confirmation of its Umayyad date than with its decoration. The second point is that there does not seem too much doubt about the date and significance of Mshatta. In reality, however, there still is a problem of Mshatta, not only because its decoration has not really been explained, but also because even its date, for which a sort of scholarly consensus seemed to have been established, may be far from assured. Historical circumstances, therefore, do not make an early Abbasid date for Mshatta impossible, any more than formal comparisons did.
