COVER ILLUSTRATION. The temple of Artemis at Gerasa (Jerash)
Photographed by Christopher William Morris ARPS
The columns of the temple of Artemis at Gerasa (modern Jerash, 40 km. north of Amman in Jordan) rise above modern dirt roads and the rubble of excavation to evoke the glories of a city whose heyday dates back almost two millennia. This massive edifice, built roughly between AD 150 and 180 and perhaps never completed, was approached from the east (left) by a Sacred Way which crossed the river Chrysorhoas ("Golden Streams") and the city's main north-south street (the Roman
Known to the Greeks as Antioch on the Chrysorhoas, a walled Hellenistic city existed here two centuries before Christ. But it was under Roman occupation, from the conquest of Syria by Pompey the Great in 63 BC to the era of Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonine emperors in the second century AD that Gerasa (from the Semitic Garshu) saw its greatest prosperity. This was based in part on its fertile location on the Wadi Jerash, but more importantly on its position on the nexus of Roman roads that linked the ten cities of the Decapolis - Gerasa among them - to the major trade route to the East. Gerasa lay on an artery that gave access to the Mediterranean, just west of Trajan's north-south 'super-highway', the Via Nova Traiana, which ran from the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea to the Roman provincial capital of Bostra. The Gospel reference to Jesus passing through the cities of the Decapolis (Mark 7.31), where he performed healing miracles before presiding over the feeding of the four thousand, is among very few literary testimonies to the area. Clearer evidence of Gerasa's prosperity are its extensive monumental remains, which include an extra-mural hippodrome with a seating capacity of about 15 000, an adjacent triumphal arch commemorating the visit of the emperor Hadrian in AD 129/30, a second major monumental temple to Zeus in the south of the city, two theatres, several bath-houses, an ornamental fountain (nymphaeum), two columnar structures (tetrapyla) spanning major crossroads and an unusual oval plaza or forum, ninety metres by eighty and enclosed within a colonnade.
Gerasa continued to flourish in the Christian period. Fifteen churches have been discovered to date, several with fine mosaics and informative dedicatory inscriptions attesting the pious benefactions of wealthy citizens. But this phase of development was on an altogether smaller scale: part of the approach to the temple of Artemis was in the sixth century ingeniously converted into a Byzantine church, while from the fourth century an ecclesiastical complex developed abutting the south side of the temple. The Byzantine cathedral measured only 140 by 75 feet: access from the Roman street reused an earlier monumental staircase which, however, soon degenerated into a narrow passage. Not far away an inscription records the unpleasant stench from the carcasses of rotting animals. Nevertheless, a fountain in the courtyard to the west of the cathedral was celebrated for its annual re-enactment of the Miracle at Cana, its water turning to wine.
Arab occupation in the seventh century brought a third phase of development, when Gerasa became a major centre of pottery manufacture: kilns were now installed in the temple of Artemis, and one of the theatres. In the ninth century the city fell into decline and was abandoned, to be rediscovered accidentally in 1806 by a German traveller. Extensive excavation work in the 1920s and 30s illuminated the major features of this spectacular site; work from the 1980s that still continues has placed greater emphasis on the early Islamic material.
Mary Whitby
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