Umm el-Jimal

The World of Umm el-Jimal in Late Antiquity (B. de Vries)

The town of Umm el-Jimal is the best preserved among dozens of similar Byzantine sites in an area ranging from Umm es-Surab in the west to Deir el-Kahf in the east, Bostra in the north to Qasr el-Hallabat in the south. Though the region has been surveyed (H. C. Butler, G. King, F. Braemer, D. Kennedy), and visited (e.g., N. Glueck), few sites in the immediate vicinity of Umm el-Jimal have received close archaeological scrutiny, and most have been put out of reach by modem settlement and agricultural redevelopment (the exception is Umm el-Quttein, where a detailed ground survey begun in 1985 [D. Kennedy and H. MacAdam] has continued recently [D. Kennedy and P. Freeman]). Thus the work at Umm el-Jimal has to stand in for a much larger region and serves as a link with projects focussing on particular sites on the perimeter of the southern Hauran: Bostra (J.-M. Dentzer), the area of the northern Hauran (F. Villeneuve), Deir el-Kahf (S. Helms and A. Betts; D. Kennedy), Hammam es-Sarakh (G. Bisheh), Qasr el-Hallabat (G. Bisheh), Khirbet es-Samra (J.-B. Humbert), Mafraq (J.-B. Humbert, Abdel-Qader al-Husan), and Rihab (M. Piccirillo).

The standing town of Umm el-Jimal is the best preserved example of late-antique (4th-9th c.) rural domestic architecture in the E Mediterranean. The adjacent, 1st-4th c. Nabataean and Roman village, though totally ruined, is equally important as the only archaeological evidence for structured village life in N Jordan in the two centuries before the Palmyrene rebellion. In other archaeological contexts, settlement strata from the period of the Pax romana have been severely disturbed by late-antique resettlement. Umm el-Jimal, however, saw essentially one period of continuous occupation and is therefore particularly important for reconstructing regional history. Inscriptions indicate that the community was bilingual Nabataean-Greek. The stratigraphy covers the transition from Roman imperial to early Byzantine conditions on the Arabian frontier.

Map showing the relationship between the late antique town and the 1st-4th c. (ER-LR) village (B. de Vries and R. Sayyegh)

The discrete stratigraphy of town and village has shown that the Nabataean houses are not the ones still standing in the town but the ruined and buried ones of the village. Thus, excavation of the village will assist the study of Nabataean domestic architecture elsewhere (Petra, Khirbet edh-Dharih, and sites in the Negev). The distinct stratigraphies invite study of a shift in the nature of urban settlement from the Roman imperial to the lateantique periods and of varying relationships to the city of Bostra, a study made specifically from the rural rather than the urban point of view.

-- excerpted from Preface and Acknowledgements in Umm el-Jimal: A frontier town and its landscape in northern Jordan. Volume I. Fieldwork, 1972-1981. Journal of Roman Archaeology. Supplementary Series. No. 26. Portsmouth, RI. 1998. Pg. 9.

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