5/19/15. Madaba, Jordan
Early yesterday morning, I white-knuckled my way for the last time down my hotel’s ridiculously steep access road. After a nostalgic rattle over the speedbumps of Jerash, I turned onto to the sweetly smooth pavement of the Amman highway, and tore out of northern Jordan at 110 Kph, bound for the King’s Highway and the long road to Petra. I encountered all the usual joys of driving in this country: manic lane-changing, random military checkpoints, tortuous detours, and hidden speedbumps. When I finally reached Madaba, my base for the day, my GPS routed me the wrong direction down a busy one-way street, subjecting me to an unprecedented volley of beeping and Arabic curses. Despite all this, I was checked into my Madaba hotel by 10:00, ready to see the sights of Jordan’s most prominent Christian city.
Madaba is famous for her mosaics. From the fourth to the seventh century, the Transjordan (roughly the Roman province of Arabia) was, like much of the eastern Empire, rapidly and thoroughly Christianized, a process that encouraged massive programs of church construction in every sizable city. Madaba, a prosperous mercantile center straddling the region’s main trade route, was no exception. Particularly in the sixth century, during and just after the reign of Justinian, Madaban notables sponsored the construction and embellishment of over a dozen churches. A local “school” of mosaic artisans emerged in response to this demand, decorating the floors (and probably walls) of the new sanctuaries with strikingly colorful and imaginative mosaics. Although the quality of their work never approached that of the masters working in Antioch or Constantinople – Madaba was, after all, a middling city on the periphery of a relatively poor province – it was at least competently executed. Equally importantly, it has survived, when so many of the masterpieces in the Empire’s great cities have vanished forever. Madaba was abandoned in late antiquity, a circumstance that saved the mosaics from overbuilding or destruction. They were rediscovered by the Arab Christians who occupied the site in the nineteenth century, and many are located in the homes and churches used by the descendants of these settlers.
Madaba’s best-known mosaic is located inside a small but garishly frescoed Greek Orthodox church. Here, surrounded by modern wooden pews, is the “Madaba Map,” a detailed representation of the Holy Land. Much of the original surface has unfortunately been destroyed, but Jerusalem is still visible, centered on a grand colonnaded avenue and dominated by five labelled churches. The river Jordan, Dead Sea, and portions of the Nile are also legible, bounding a landscape punctuated by dozens of city-icons.
Although none of the Madaba’s other mosaics was so impressive, the sheer quantity on display was striking. Two archaeological parks near the map church preserved the floors of three more churches and two luxurious private residences, all covered in elaborate mosaic cycles. In one place, the apse of a church built in the period of iconoclasm, worked in studiously abstract shapes, stood cheek by jowl with a house featuring the myth of Hippolytus and a series of female nudes. The priests apparently didn’t know what was going on next door.
After an hour peering at mosaics, I returned to my hotel, retrieved my car, and drove twenty miles through increasingly lonely countryside to Machareus, the Herodian palace where John the Baptist was executed. When I finally arrived, mine was the only car in a blistering parking lot. A vast and silent vista pressed in on every side. Ahead, the remains of the palace stood on an isolated eminence of the blasted hills that hem the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. Seams of dull red rock, tormented by eons of earthquakes, writhed in the valleys below, mirrored by waves of heat streaming over the ruins. Beyond, barely visible, the Dead Sea seethed, adding salt to the heavy air.
The remains of the palace proved little more than an incidental addition to the drama of this landscape: on finally reaching the summit –which took almost a half-hour of sweaty climbing –I found only two restored columns amid a labyrinthine network of foundation walls and half-excavated cellars; for all I know, I blithely sat and sipped my water in the hall where Salome danced. As I walked around the baking hilltop, however, I found myself progressively less concerned with the past associations of the ruins than with their present lack of shade. I took my pictures, and slogged back down.
My last destination of the day was equally isolated, but in a vastly different landscape. As I drove east and south, the terrain gradually became gentler and more fertile, rocky canyons giving way to rolling hills. Turning east from the King’s Highway, thirty kilometers of country roads winding through a sea of yellow wheat brought me to the Roman camp and late antique town of Umm ar-Rasas. A large and apparently new visitor center marked the entrance to the site, and a commemorative plaque outside proudly recorded the site’s inclusion on the World Heritage list. But I was again the only visitor, perhaps the first in a while: grass was growing in the parking lot, and the visitor center was deserted except for a guard, who seemed frankly startled to see me. Umm ar-Rasas seems to be another victim of the general slump in Near Eastern tourism. While this is a pity, I was thus able, yet again, to enjoy a first-rate site in complete solitude.
Sighing fields of wheat surrounded the tumbled square of the Roman camp and the less orderly ruins of the adjoining town, both of which remain mostly unexcavated. The archaeologists who worked here in the early twentieth century were interested primarily in the churches. Most of the seventeen they uncovered had striking mosaic floors, which – fortunately – were left in situ. Less fortunately, most of these have since been covered with burlap and sand to shield them from the elements.
A glorious exception is the eighth-century Church of St. Stephen, whose intricate floor has been covered with a sheet metal roof. Thus protected, the whole mosaic program has been left on view. I spent long minutes studying its famous border, which shows stylized representations of local cities, most prominently Jerusalem and Castron Mefaa (the ancient name of Umm ar-Rasas). After viewing the mosaics, I wandered among the ruins for more than an hour, and especially enjoyed clambering around in the tantalizing unexcavated quadrangle of the Roman camp.
Yet the most memorable monument I saw stood more than a kilometer outside the city, on a lonely hill surrounded by wheat fields. This is the building known only as “the tower,” an isolated structure some fifty feet tall but only eight feet square. The masonry is solid to a point near the very top, where it encases a room with four small windows, each carved with a cross. This tower is thought to have been the perch of a stylite – of a holy man, that is, who spent years perched atop a column or in some other inaccessible high place. Now, after fifteen centuries of earthquakes, the holy man’s seat has become precarious, and wind whistles through cracks in the masonry. Yet it still stands, somber against a backdrop of golden fields. I found myself watching it disappear into the wheat as I drove away.
In the evening, after getting a pizza at a local restaurant, I ate dinner on my hotel room balcony, overlooking a neighborhood of low white houses and the wheat fields beyond. Just at sunset, clouds of pigeons whirled up from the rooftops, darting and diving in response to lures held by unseen hands. Pigeon fancying – the sport of luring pigeons into one’s captive flock – is very popular in Jordan, particularly among young boys. I guess video games haven’t caught on here yet.