Middle Court. We now descended to the middle court of the Shirvanshah Palace complex. Here we came to a large number of broken slabs of stone, some decorated with faces of people, camels, and goats, and many with Arabic script. They were from the ruins of a castle called Sabayil Qala, a fort that once protected an island which is now submerged in the water just off the shore of Baku’s southern Bayil Peninsula (hence, called Bayil Stones). These stones were found in two expeditions by Soviet archeologists in the 1950s.There were many writings in Persian on these stones, as I was shown by a woman standing nearby who said she was a local teacher.