Dome of the Rock

This guide to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem opens in 1993, when Jordan's King Hussein sold a house in London to buy eighty kilograms of gold for the shrine's leaking roof rather than let a rival kingdom pay for it. It reaches back to the 690s, when the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik reportedly paid his craftsmen in gold dinars and melted down what was left over the dome itself. Listen for how two rulers, thirteen centuries apart, treated this roof as worth almost anything.