Gerasa
Interesting facts
- In 2025 archaeologists identified a mass grave of about 230 victims of the Plague of Justinian here, the first confirmed one from that pandemic in the eastern Mediterranean.
- The Temple of Artemis, the city's patron goddess, was never finished; its surviving columns stand about 13 metres tall.
- The Corinthian capitals of the Artemis temple still carry the signature of Hygeinos, the contractor who carved them.
- The Temple of Artemis survived the earthquake of 749 that brought down much of the city; a later quake in the 12th or 13th century toppled its upper walls.
- Hadrian's Arch stands well outside the city walls, a sign of a planned southward expansion of Gerasa that was never carried out.
- During the First Jewish–Roman War Gerasa was one of the few gentile cities that spared its Jewish residents and escorted those who wished to leave to the border.
- The Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus besieged and captured Gerasa in the early 80s BC, briefly bringing it under Judean rule.
- At least 14 churches were built in Gerasa between the 4th and 7th centuries, many of them floored with fine mosaics.
- A water-powered saw here used a crank mechanism to turn rotary motion into the back-and-forth stroke of a blade.
- Excavations in 2016 and 2018 recovered marble statues of the Muses, Zeus and Aphrodite, and a head thought to portray the empress Julia Domna.
Why it is worth it
Few cities of the Roman East survive as legibly as Gerasa. Its plan can still be walked end to end: an oval plaza ringed by Ionic columns, a long colonnaded main street crossed by side streets at two tetrapyla, two theatres, a hippodrome, a monumental fountain, and the high temples of Zeus and Artemis looking down on it all. The ruins have earned Jerash the nicknames "Pompeii of the East" and "city of a thousand columns", and the modern town, capital of a governorate in the hills of northern Jordan, grows around them.
People lived here from the Neolithic onward — a site within the town has yielded human remains dated to about 7500 BC. The Greek city of Gerasa, also called Antioch on the Chrysorrhoas ("golden river"), claimed in its own inscriptions a foundation by Alexander the Great and his general Perdiccas, though other evidence points to the Seleucid or Ptolemaic kings. After the Roman conquest of 63 BC Pompey attached it to the Decapolis, the league of self-governing Hellenistic cities. In AD 106 it passed into the new province of Arabia, and trade along Trajan's roads brought a building boom; when Hadrian visited in 129–130, the city raised a triumphal arch in his honour. Wealthy citizens paid for many of its monuments. In the South Theatre a single stone marked in the centre of the orchestra lets an ordinary speaking voice carry across the auditorium. The mathematician Nicomachus was born here.
Under Byzantine rule the city filled with churches, some built over temples, which trace the development of early church architecture; one, of AD 530, sits on a mosaic floor with Greek and Hebrew-Aramaic inscriptions, suggesting a synagogue turned into a church. Gerasa continued to thrive under the Umayyads, minting coins and producing lamps stamped with its Arabic name, until the earthquake of 749 brought much of it down. Excavation has been revealing the ancient city since 1925, and since 1981 its theatres and streets have hosted the summer Jerash Festival of Culture and Arts.
Getting there
The ruins lie beside the centre of Jerash, about 1 km from the town, and roughly 48 km north of Amman by road. The nearest airport is Amman's Marka (Civil) Airport (ADJ), about 35 km away; the country's main international gateway is Queen Alia International Airport (AMM), south of Amman.
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From the encyclopaedia
Jerash or Jarash is a city in northern Jordan. The city is the administrative center of the Jerash Governorate, and has a population of 50,745 as of 2015. It is located 30.0 miles north of the capital city Amman.
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