Northern Towns - Jerash

Dubbed Gerasa in ancient times, Jerash is one of the most extensive extant provincial Roman cities. Gerasa, along with Pella, was a member of the Decapolis, a commercial league of ten cities in Rome’s Asian Province (the Antiquities’ answer to the European Economic Community). Because of its isolation in a remote valley among the mountains of Gilead, Jerash survived long after the other nine cities were destroyed.

Unlike the other great cities of the classical period in this area, Jerash is typically Roman in design. The city trampled over earlier settlements, so little evidence of pre-Roman days remains. Inscriptions calling the town Antioch reveal that the Seleu-cid king of that name had a prominent outpost here, but Jerash entered its golden age only after its conquest by the Roman Emperor Pompey in 63 BC. For the next three centuries, Jerash prospered: granite was brought from as far away as Aswan and old temples were razed and rebuilt according to the latest architectural fads. The Emperor Trajan annexed the Nabatean lands in 106 AD and built a highway from Damascus to Aqaba that passed through Jerash. Hadrian visited the town in 129; the Triumphal Arch built for the occasion still stands. The town was converted to Christianity and had a bishop by the mid-4th century.

Following the destruction of the Syrian trading center at Palmyra and the decline of the Nabatean kingdom, trade routes shifted from the desert to the sea. Frantic construction continued through the 6th century, but without their former wealth, Jerash’s citizens could only replace the older monuments with flashy, inferior structures which were then plundered by invading Persians in 635 AD. The great earthquake of 747 AD relegated what little remained to the hands of the Muslim Arabs, who by then controlled the city. The Crusaders described Jerash as uninhabited, and it remained abandoned until its rediscovery in the 19th century. After the invasion of the Ottoman Turks, Circassians built the modern town on the eastern slope of the stream valley in what was once the main residential area of ancient Jerash.