5-18-15. Northern Jordan
My drive this morning took me into the desert that covers nearly nine-tenths of Jordan. As I travelled eastward, the hills on both sides went from green to tan, and finally flattened into a plain of red and black rock. My destination was Umm al-Jimal, a remarkably well-preserved late antique town built entirely of black basalt. Despite the site’s importance, it lies well off the usual tour bus track from Amman, and thus receives few visitors; during my three hours there, I saw no other tourists.
At its peak in the fifth and sixth centuries, Umm al-Jimal probably had four or five thousand inhabitants, most of them farmers working in the stable frontier lands of the Roman province of Arabia. Before overgrazing and climate change turned most of it into desert, the land was relatively fertile, and a substantial garrison of Roman troops ensured protection from raids by the desert tribes. Until the frontier began to collapse in the sixth century, the city enjoyed a long period of relative prosperity, which allowed some of the wealthier inhabitants to build imposing two- and three story homes walled, floored, and roofed in the local basalt. Many of these are still standing today, alongside seventeen churches and a sizeable Roman fort.
I enjoyed walking through and scrambling over these ruins, which provide an unparalleled glimpse into the everyday lives of Roman provincials; the grand public architecture of cities like Gerasa and Gadara is, after all, only part of the story of ancient urbanism. Although a small modern town has grown up along the southern edge of the ruins, the view in every direction was dominated by the desert, a rolling tan plain punctuated by dust devils hundreds of feet high.
Toward the end of my visit, as I leaned on a heap of hot basalt blocks in the apse of a ruined church and watched a particularly large dust devil glide over the plain, I reflected on how terrible it would be to break down in such a desolate place. I returned to the empty parking lot to discover that I had a flat tire.
In the end, the solution proved relatively painless. The site guard called his buddy in the neighboring village, who popped on the dealer tire and led me to his shop a few kilometers away. The repair cost me only a few dinars, and I was on my way within twenty minutes. The puncture, it turned out, was caused by a screw I must have run over on a side street – thanks, no doubt, to my GPS, which has an irritating habit of trying to save me kilometers by detouring me down “shortcuts” that swiftly become one-way streets or gravel tracks.
The GPS was in fine form on my way to the next site, diverting me through a gritty industrial suburb of Amman, where potholes a foot deep yawned at every corner. It was a relief to reach the solitude of Qasr Hallabat, my next destination. Qasr (castle) Hallabat was constructed in the second century as a small Roman fort guarding the Arabian frontier. After serving this purpose for a few hundred years, it was occupied first by Rome’s Arabian allies, and then by the Ummayads, rulers of the first great Islamic empire. The Ummayads, whose eastern frontiers lay in modern Pakistan, had no use for a border fort in the heart of their domains. Recognizing the old building’s convenient location on the road to Damascus, however, they converted it into a pleasure palace, where the caliph and his companions could rest when passing through southern Syria. Although only a few traces survive of the mosaic floors and fine stonework the Ummayads installed, enough remains of the Roman fort turned Islamic hunting lodge to trace its unique architectural trajectory. The setting added considerably to the building’s effect: tawny desert, swept by towering dust devils, stretched to every horizon.
