Umm el-Jimal

UMM EL-JIMAL: Gem of the Black Desert

Amman: Al-Kutba. 1990. Pg. 5-8.

My love affair with Umm el-Jimal began with my first visit on a late summer afternoon in 1971. The city's dark basalt buildings stood majestically aglow in the warm light of the setting desert sun.

"Is any one working on this place?" I asked. The answer was "No." I've been coming back to excavate ever since then.

Unfortunately, most people arrive at Umm el-Jimal close to noon. The glaring sun, blazing heat, washed out colors and faded horizons encourage many to write off the place as hostile and barren, isolated in the desert. How regrettable this impression is; Umm el-Jimal is neither isolated nor unpleasant.

In January 1983, 1 enjoyed my first winter visit. One crisp morning after a snowfall in the uplands, standing on top of a high reconstruction scaffold, I viewed the world of Umm el-Jimal as it must have presented itself to its ancient residents.

To the north was a marvelous sight: the snow-covered heights of Jebel el-Arab in Syria, etched against a dark blue sky, seemed afloat above the still green lower slopes beyond Bosra. It all seemed so close and touchable, yet surreal and spiritual. To the east around Jawa, I saw the barren, hostile-looking volcanic peaks of the Black Desert. To the south, Qasr Hallabat was visible on its high point, repeating the shape of the Umm el-Jimal fort immediately below me. To the west past Deraa, Jebel ash-Sheikh stood shimmering beyond the Golan horizon, awash in morning sunlight and framed at the same time by black-grey monster clouds.

That day, those monster clouds dumped their load of snow on Jebel ash-Sheikh and enough rain on Umm el-Jimal to stop our cementmixing and begin the flow of lifegiving water from the ancient canals into the city's reservoirs.

Here you have the two extremes: the blazing summer noonday when most tourists arrive and the driving winter rain that forced me back into my tent. Between those extremes is a surprisingly pleasant climate that makes most days of the year and most parts of each day a joy to be outdoors.

Umm el-Jimal is located in the north Jordanian desert on the southern edge of a basalt plateau created by prehistoric volcanic eruptions. The region is known as the Hauran, a land that slopes down gradually from the Jebel el-Arab in Syria. It takes an hour and a half to drive there from Amman-the best way is through Zarqa, Rihab and Mafraq, then east on the H-4 road.

The approach to the city is a dramatic experience. As its skyline emerges from the stark plain, it appears first as a living city, then as a fire-bombed ghost town, and finally as the collection of amazingly wellpreserved ancient ruins that it really is.

Inside the city, the visitor is plunged into a world of eerie beauty. Walls run in every direction without apparent plan or order. Neatly stacked courses of stone grow out of the mad confusion of tumbled upper stories. The deep grey of basalt everywhere gives a somber and cool sense of shadow despite the blazing desert sun. Here and there, pinnacles of wall reach up three stories high, their fingers of cantilevered stone silhouetted against the cloudless sky, defying gravity. Doorways and alleys lead from room to room, building to building, through more stone, more walls.

This city closes you in, swallows you up. The desert silence is sharpened by the glassy crunch of basalt underfoot. Excitement becomes mixed with confusion and aloneness, and you wonder if this is really a place for human beings.

Then you stumble through a doorway into a room with corbeled ceiling intact, into real shadow and welcome coolness. Inside these four walls, there is a sense of order and civilization. The opposite wall holds a row of mangers; a stone sink hangs in one comer. The mind's eye restores the bits of plaster on the walls, adds a coat of paint, and then almost hears the splash of hands being washed in the basin ... sees a cow tethered with a bit of rope tied to the round hole on the side of a manger. This eerie, desolate place becomes a teeming city.

Five thousand people once lived here-people who knew how to protect themselves in a hostile desert and create comfort even for their animals; people who knew how to channel and store the precious winter rain to slake the summer thirst; people who knew how to coax a crop of grain out of barren land. And you wonder who they were, why they settled here, and why they left.

Although it was continuously occupied for 800 years from the first century B.C. to the eighth century A.D. and again from World War I to the present, Umm el-Jimal shows no evidence of occupation before the first century, and it lay completely abandoned between A.D. 750 and the 20th century.

This history of settlement and abandonment begins with the Nabataeans of Petra, who in the first century B.C. extended the influence of their south Jordanian kingdom north into Syria as far as Damascus. The numerous Nabataean inscriptions and architectural remains in places like Umm el-Jimal, Bosra and Si'a testify to Nabataean presence, although the precise nature of their role in the region is still far from clear. Consider this archaeological puzzle: the distinctive Nabataean pottery, so common at southern sites, is almost totally lacking at otherwise identifiable Nabataean sites such-as Umm el-Jimal.

Nabataean influence in the region, which continued through the first century A.D., included a shift of capital from Petra to Bosra. But it fell increasingly under the political control of Rome and its vassals. Finally, in A.D. 106, declining Nabataean power saw its climax in the Roman annexation of Petra and the southern Nabataean Kingdom. The region between the Hauran and the Gulf of Aqaba east of the Roman Decapolis, including Umm el-Jimal, became part of the new province of Roman Arabia, with its capital at Bosra. This brought an end to the uncertain status of the region. Proximity to Bosra and a military presence brought more people and peaceful development to the entire Hauran region.

The region prospered throughout the Roman and Byzantine eras, and also after the Islamic conquest under the Umayyad Caliphate. The conflict between Muslim and Byzantine armies left the towns intact, and the tolerance of the new authorities made conversion to Islam a slow process. In addition, its location near the administrative center of the vast Islamic empire continued to give the region strategic and economic significance. The Caliphate's shift from Damascus to Baghdad in A.D. 750, however, perhaps combined with natural catastrophe, eventually brought about the irrelevance and abandonment of the area.

The role that Umm el-Jimal played in these historical developments is still difficult to determine. Its present Arabic name which means "Mother of Camels" -has misled some people to think of the ancient site exclusively as a caravan city, though there really is no evidence to support that assumption.Because of its location on the edge of the desert, Umm el-Jimal can best be thought of as a frontier city. The cultural, demographic and military implications of this should be explained briefly.

In using designations like "Roman" and "Byzantine," one is often tempted to think in terms of Roman and Greek people. It is true that large numbers of Greeks and Macedonians came into the region in the wake of Alexander, and that numerous officials and soldiers from Rome and elsewhere in the Empire moved in and eventually mixed with the local population. While this probably happened to some extent at Umm el-Jimal, the fact is that, especially on the frontier, the people were predominantly local Aramaic or Arabic-speaking.

We have numerous tombstone inscriptions (often on stones reused as corbels) which give the names of individuals. These are written in Greek with proper grammatical endings, but they are actually Arabic or Aramaic in origin (Aretas=Harith, Zabdion=Zabd, Masechos=Masich). The influence of foreign languages then probably was similar to the influence of English on modem Jordanians today. The local language predominated, but people learned sufficient Greek and Latin in order to survive successfully in the "modem" world of the Roman and Byzantine empires.

The same sort of local and foreign mixture helps explain the individual character of the architecture and city plan as well. For example, the technique of corbeling-a centuries-old architectural system-is combined with the use of the arch, a device elaborated by the Romans, to produce the distinctive architectural style of the Hauran region.

Granted that the inhabitants were indigenous to the general area, we still ask, "Where did they come from?" and "Why did they settle here?" It is probable that they were simply nomads of the region attracted to a more sedentary life by the new stability of Roman order, perhaps even encouraged by the Roman authorities in the same way that modern Bedouin have been by the Jordanian Government.

It is also probable that the settlement of Umm el-Jimal occurred with a movement of people eastward from the lusher regions of Syria and Palestine. In periods of low population, the marginal land of the Hauran held no attraction, but in an era of great demand for food and space, even this land became profitable to farm and essential to relieve overcrowding in the heartland. Conversely, when the population of the region declined again in the late Umayyad period, the hinterland was abandoned for more attractive living space available elsewhere.

For strategic and military reasons, the settlement of the region also was of value to Roman and Byzantine authorities. It fit well with their development of a fortified frontier from Aqaba to the Euphrates, the Limes Arabicus, as a defense line against threats of nomadic raiding and Persian invasion. The security provided by the extensive frontier fortifications made it unnecessary to build a very elaborate defensive system around the cities themselves, which in turn served as support centers for the supply of manpower, animals, foodstuffs and other goods to the forts and camps in their vicinity.

While excavations undertaken over the past decade have produced much evidence of occupation in the Nabataean-Early Roman period, what one sees standing today is the more sizable Byzantine and Umayyad city.

A rural city of people only remotely touched by the splendidly ornate Hellenistic style of imperial cities, Umm el-Jimal is no Jerash. No Hadrian commissioned grand buildings here; there is no forum, no theatre, no mile-long street of columns. The architecture is simple, without frills.

Jerash is monumental, a symbol to the glory of Rome; Umm el-Jimal is ordinary, a symbol to the real life of Rome's subjects. The remains of its buildings and churches give us a glimpse of people-Arabs, Syrians, Nabataeans-living plain lives. These were the people who provided the backbone of the Roman order and economy.

The buildings are unassuming; there are no finely carved Corinthian capitals. There is no city plan with rectilinear layout; buildings were put up helter-skelter in available space, leaving winding alleys of various widths for streets.

What remains visible above ground today is largely the product of the remodeling and occupation phases in the Late Byzantine and Umayyad periods. There is a city wall and four gates, at least 159 houses, two public buildings, fourteen churches, and an aqueduct system supplying at least seventeen open and eight covered reservoirs.

The city wall was constructed as an enclosure for the various building complexes. One gets the impression that it was designed not as a rampart against military attack but rather as an enclosure, both for keeping occasional desert marauders out and domestic animals in.

The houses, large and small, are all of the traditional Middle Eastern type: a single entry opens onto a central courtyard surrounded by a multi-storied complex of rooms, accessible from the courtyard via doorways and stairways. The whole complex is closed off from the outside environment, and in the sheltered and protected interior the family and animals intermixed closely.

In most cases, a large portion of the bottom floor was used to house animals. There are rooms with well-constructed mangers, often with tethering devices for large animals (donkeys, horses, cows), and bigger rooms for the simple indoor penning of smaller animals (sheep, goats). Often the larger room has a latrine for human use in one of its comers. This architectural arrangement indicates that a great deal of attention was paid to the proper care of domestic animals, and that animal husbandry was a major component of the Umm el-Jimal economy.

The presence of so much housing space for animals helps to explain the apparently large open spaces that exist inside the city walls, much of which were probably used for penning animals. These open spaces are crisscrossed by walls which are now ruined to ground level; what appears as open space today may actually have been built up with numerous animal pen partitions in the Late Byzantine period.

With the animals occupying much of the lower floor, one has to imagine that the living space for humans was on the second and higher floors. Even here, some of the rooms may have functioned as lofts for the storage of fodder. But a four-story house is not uncommon, and there was still room for an extended family of two or three generations composed of twenty to forty individuals in a typical complex.

These houses do not stand independently, but are arranged in clusters of two to eight. A possible explanation is that as the extended family grew, contiguous housing units were constructed around a new courtyard to accommodate branches of the expanding family.

Unlike typical Hellenistic cities, Umm el-Jimal has no clearly delineated area of public buildings. Whatever such buildings exist are sporadically interspersed among the numerous domestic structures. Although most were churches, two had to do with military and civilian administration. There is the Barracks, almost certainly designed to house a detachment of soldiers. A second building, called the Praetorium because of its unusual architecture, is of unknown function.

The fourteen churches of Umm el-Jimal are in fairly good states of preservation. They can be divided into two groups according to location: free-standing or built into insulae. The freestanding churches may have been accessible to the entire community, or to a particular religious or monastic group. The churches built into the various domestic insulae could well have been constructed by extended families for their own use. There is also the possibility that different churches were built in dedication to different apostles or saints.

So Umm el-Jimal still stands. Its remarkable durability and strange beauty have survived the centuries, still bathed in the afterglow of an ancient people's ingenuity and vitality.

Dr. De Vries, professor of history at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been working at Umm el-Jimal since 1972. After mapping the city in 1972- 73, he directed excavations in 1974, 1977, 1981 and 1984, and also supervised reconstruction work for the Department of Antiquities in 1983. His wife, Sally De Vries, who was administrative director during the last three seasons of excavation, completed a photographic survey of artistic symbols at the site.

The Umm el-Jimal Project has been funded by a variety of donors. Sponsored by Calvin College, it is affiliated with the American Schools of Oriental Research and conducted under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.