The best-preserved remains are still visible in the courtyard today. By some estimates, the original mosque had the largest area of gold mosaics in the world, covering approximately . Byzantine artisans were employed to create the mosaics, which depict landscapes and buildings in a characteristic late Roman style. They reflected a wide variety of artistic styles used by mosaicists and painters since the 1st century CE, but the combined use of all these different styles in the same place was innovative at the time. Similar to the Dome of the Rock, built earlier by Abd al-Malik, vegetation and plants were the most common motif, but those of the Damascus mosque are more naturalistic. In addition to the large landscape depictions, a mosaic frieze with an intricate vine motif (referred to as the karma in Arabic historical sources) once ran around the walls of the prayer hall, above the level of the mihrab. The only notable omission is the absence of human and animal figures, which was likely a new restriction imposed by the Muslim patron. Scholars have long debated the meaning of the mosaic imagery. Some historical Muslim writers and some modern scholars have interpreted them as a representation of all the cities in the known world (or within the Umayyad Caliphate at the time), while other scholars interpret them as a depiction of Paradise. The mihrab The original mihrab was one of the first concave mihrabs in the Islamic world, the second one known to exist after the one created in 706–707 during al-Walid's reconstruction of the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. The exact appearance of the mosque's original main mihrab is uncertain, due to the multiple repairs and restorations that took place over the centuries. Ibn Jubayr, who visited the mosque in 1184, described the inside of the mihrab as filled with miniature blind arcades whose arches resembled "small mihrabs", each filled with inlaid mother-of-pearl mosaics and framed by spiral columns of marble. This mihrab was famed across the Islamic world for its beauty, as noted by other writers of the era. Its appearance may have been imitated by other surviving mihrabs built under the Mamluk sultans al-Mansur Qalawun and al-Nasir Muhammad in the 13th and 14th centuries, such as the richly-decorated mihrab of Qalawun's mausoleum in Cairo (completed in 1285). Scholars generally assume that the mihrab described by Ibn Jubayr dated from a restoration of the mosque in