For a thousand years the Christian Church, East and West, shared a common artistic spirit that continued in the East long after humanism had prevailed in the art of the West. In this book, Mahmoud Zibawi explores that spirit as it has been manifested in four regions: Syria-Mesopotamia, Armenia, Egypt, and Ethiopia. By tracing the political, religious, and cultural outlines of these regions, he shows that the Christian communities of each were indeed a "world," but a world of unending change. Time after time, these communities found themselves torn apart by doctrinal controversies, persecutions, political upheavals, foreign conquests. But through all the centuries as the author stresses, their religious art, "images of eternity," reflected the one primordial vision of Eastern Christianity, that of the unseen face of God reflected in the many faces of transfigured humanity in a world redeemed and radiant. The more than 280 illustrations, 96 in color, amply demonstrate that this art was universal and multi-cultural. "Exchange and communion" surmounted religious, racial, cultural, and political divisions: Jacobites and Melchites decorated one another's churches; Ethiopians and Armenians settled in Jerusalem; Muslims and Christians shared a common desire to glorify the divine Transcendence.