摘要: Description　　Ancient Umm al-Jimal is in the Southern Hauran plain, the semi-arid Badia region of north Jordan, a basalt plain created by prehistoric volcanic eruptions from the slopes of the Jabal

Description

　　Ancient Umm al-Jimal[1] is in the Southern Hauran plain, the semi-arid Badia region of north Jordan, a basalt plain created by prehistoric volcanic eruptions from the slopes of the Jabal al-Arab, whose peaks are visible on clear winter days fifty km to the north-east in southern Syria. The site is 675 m above sea level and receives 150 mm average annual rainfall. The great Roman highway, the Via Nova Traiana constructed AD 112-14 during Trajan’s rule, passes Umm al-Jimal 6 km to the west on its way from Bostra to Philadelphia (Amman). It is best viewed where it crosses the road between Umm al-Jimal and Umm as-Surab, at a point about one km west of Qasr Ba‘ij, a ten minute drive west of Umm al-Jimal. Umm al-Jimal itself is on a side road that left the Via Nova at Qasr Ba‘ij, and went on to Umm al-Quttein and Dayr al-Kahf to the east. This side road was part of a network of secondary roads that connected the Southern Hauran’s towns and villages with major market centers like Bostra and Suweida, and the desert oasis of Azraq. The town’s remains are visible from the air as a 400 x 800 m rectangle of rubble ruins flanked on its east and west sides by the modern village of the same name. Ancient Umm al-Jimal nestles in a fork created by the joining of two wadis (dry riverbeds) that still bring the winter runoff water from the lower slopes of the Jabal al-Arab to fill the site’s numerous ancient reservoirs.

　　Umm al-Jimal was occupied and built for 7-800 years from the mid-1st Century AD to the 8th Century. From the 9th to the 20th century it was reused by nomads and sporadically resettled until formal possession as a protected archaeological site by the Government of Jordan in 1972. In its first 750 years Umm al-Jimal had three quite distinct personae.

　　In the Nabataean- Early Roman Period[2] from the 1st-3rd centuries it was a satellite of Bostra and received its impetus from late Nabataean sedentarization of its northern realm and then Roman governance of the Provincia Arabia. Thus, from the reigns of the last Nabataean king, Rabbel II, and the first Roman Emperor, Trajan (AD 106), to the end of the Severan Dynasty (AD 235), the town served as an outreach of monarchic and imperial hegemony, symbolized by monumental Nabataean and Roman structures, the fragments of which survive in the later ruins. During this period, local people were settled in a sort of worker’s village comprised of simple field-stone houses 50 m to the southeast of the town, a 250-m diameter oval which today is privately owned. Both the town and the village were destroyed in the frontier upheavals of the late 3rd Century (the Palmyrene insurrection). The village was never reoccupied and survives today as al Herri, “the Ruins.”

　　The second Umm al-Jimal was a Late Roman military station on the Limes Arabicus, the 4th-5th Century fortified frontier defensive system created and constructed by the emperors Diocletian and Constantine after those 3rd-C upheavals. Already in the 2nd Century the Roman imperial authorities had constructed a gate (under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus) and a wall on East side of the town. That was followed by the construction of the great reservoir and the Praetorium. While these structures survived the upheavals, to restore order, Diocletian’s imperial reorganization included the construction of a major fortification, a castellum, on the east side of the town. Now Umm al-Jimal functioned as a stitch in the blanket of total defensive security in which Diocletian had attempted to swaddle the Roman Empire. You can imagine the 4th-5th Century site with the Commodus Gate, the Praetorium, Reservoir 9 and the castellum in place, but without the later Barracks, houses and the churches dominating the skyline today.

　　In its third, Byzantine-Umayyad, persona the gradual lifting of imperial military occupation enabled the local Arab civilian population to resettle and turn the site into the prosperous rural farming and trading town of the 5th to 8th centuries. The transformation from military station to civilian town was gradual, and is typical of the general transformation from imperial to late antique culture that took place in the East Mediterranean in the 5th century. This resulted from the failure of Diocletian’s system of massive defenses along the eastern frontier and reaction to the debilitating economic oppression such a system required. Ironically, as imperial military security weakened and decentralized, the prosperity of the eastern frontier increased to reach a peak in the 6th century. This prosperity was evident in the construction and use of 150 basalt houses and 16 churches from the 5th to 7th centuries. The ruins surviving from this phase give the site its dramatic and distinctive archaeological landscape today.

　　From the 9th century to the present this late antique residential landscape was reused by nomads and sporadic settlers attracted to the essential water supply and convenient shelter of structures only partially collapsed from periodic earthquakes. There is ceramic evidence of an ephemeral Mamluk occupation, continuing in the Early Ottoman period. Then in the Late Ottoman and Mandate periods of the early 20th Century Druze sedentists and Arab nomads moved into the site and began an extensive repair of the Byzantine-Umayyad houses for domestic reuse. After the Druze settlers left in the 1930s the Arab members of the Masa’eid tribe continued to live on the site into the Modern era until the government of Jordan fenced the site in 1972. In addition to their use and maintenance of the ancient houses, these final residents reconditioned several reservoirs, and today many adults over thirty remember their families’ reliance on that water supply when they were children.

　　[1]Scholars’ efforts to identify the ancient site with either Thantia or Surrata have proven to be inconclusive.

　　[2] Though there are distinct Nabataean and Roman architectural fragments, the two cultural phases overlap because significant datable Nabataean inscriptions were produced in the second century, the Early Roman period, when Roman emperors from Trajan to Commodus were the rulers of the Provincia Arabia.