Q: I am reading Ben-Hur (1880) by Lew Wallace and I have come across a word, “lewen,” that I cannot find in any dictionary. It appears to be an architectural feature in this example: “The arches of the lewens rested on clustered columns.”
A: The word “lewen” in Ben-Hur is Lew Wallace’s rendering of ليوان, an Arab word of Persian origin, typically spelled “liwan” in English and pronounced lee-WAHN. In your example, it’s a vaulted hall open on one side, such as a portico in a palace.
“In classical Persian and Arabic texts the term usually refers to a palace building or some formal part of a palace, such as a platform, balcony or portico,” according to The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture (2009), edited by Jonathan M. Bloom and Sheila S. Blair.
But among modern archeologists and art historians, Grove says, the term is used solely for a “vaulted hall with walls on three sides and completely open on the fourth”—a portico, in other words.
The encyclopedia adds that the basic form of the liwan “can be traced back to Mesopotamia and Iran during the time of the Parthians and Sassanian,” two ancient pre-Islamic Persian empires.
In Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the open side of the liwan usually faces a courtyard. And that’s the way it’s used in your example and many others in the novel.
For readers unfamiliar with the book, it features the stories of Jesus and Judah Ben-Hur, a fictional Jewish prince who is enslaved by the Romans and becomes a Christian.
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