Artistic and Archaeological Study on Six Wooden Screen Walls in Assiut Churches.

Screen Wall or Iconostasis (Hijab) in the church that separates the sanctuary from the area of prayers.The idea of separation the sanctuary from the area of compression was started in the early church. The Arab word for screen wall (Hijab) 1which literally means curtains but Copts did not prefer to call it Hijab. Some scholars and historians mentioned that the term of Hijab is incorrect translation to Greek word screen wall which means the place for hanging icons its wrongly named as Hijab like the Hijab of sanctuary of Solomon the church neglects this name as its function was not to hide the sanctuary, the symbolism of screen wall as a part of church refer to the truth of the church as holy icon of Jerusalem it represents with icons celestial case for prayers 2 . This study aims to show the importance of the iconostases according to the analytical descriptive method of the examined iconostases, the material they were made of. This is followed by the analytical study of what was decorated on the iconostases, the Coptic and Arabic languages that were written on the iconostases and the ways of carving on the wood and the floral and geometrical decorations that appeared on these iconostases. The most important results of this paper is that the panels which topped the iconostases are  inscribed with Arabic and Coptic writings.