Also called “Moorish bath “or “Turkish bath “, the hammam is a bath with a sweating room. It allows practicing Muslims to make ritual cleansing and that explains why it was sometimes regarded as an “mosque appendix”.  For over  one millennium, the hammam, with the mosque and the souk (market), was one of the constitutive elements of the Islamic city. Following the traditional model of the ancient Roman thermal bath and intended for body hygiene, the hammam plays a significant role in Muslim, social life. According to the day and the hour, it is reserved for men or women when it does not contain double facilities. There are baths in the princely Umayyad residences in the desert as in medieval citadels, public baths in towns and cities, private baths in urban patrician homes. The beauty and the number of hammams has been a subject of pride for a city. The architecture of the hammam includes certain traditional elements : the  apodythorium , the dressing room and room for resting, with adjoining bathrooms; corridors of varying widths connect it to the central part of the bath which includes three room whose arrangements and dimensions have varied over the centuries; the frigidariumis, an unheated transitional room where one undresses in winter; it is no longer the main room reserved for physical exercise as it was in Ancient times; the swimming pool and the palestre have disappeared. There are two heated rooms, one warm, the tepidarium, the other hot,  the caldarium, which is equipped with stone slabs that the personnel uses when giving care to the bather. The dimensions of the two last rooms indicate how practices have evolved. The dressing room may be covered with a cupola surmounted by a skylight and resting on drum, but the central part has no opening for ventilation: heat is preserved by strong thick walls on which vaults or cupolas incrusted with bottle ends are artistically placed in geometric patterns lighting the room. The hammam also includes, a boiler room and a fuel storage space. Until  the 12th  century the heating was done by a hot water distribution system with embedded ceramic pipes (hypocausts)  placed in the ground and the walls: this system was later abandoned and replaced  by a chimney conduit, with rooms laid out along the central axis of the flue proceeding from the hearth .The  Oriental bath has its ancestor in Syria in the bath of the Umayyad castle where the resting room became the reception; here there is  an enfilade of three rooms: first an unheated room, then the warm one and finally the hot room or sweating room which adjoins the boiler room. Four centuries later, the urban bath  has as its prototype a simplified version of the Umayyad bath. Today floor plans will be a variation on this basic plan with rooms varying in size.