Thursday, June 19, 2014

Madaba

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"Madaba"

Jordan
Friday, ‎December ‎27, ‎2013

Seventh Day of my Holy Land Trip, Mount Zion, Jerusalem

My Holy Land Trip



"Madaba"

Jordan

Madaba visitors center, Madaba, Jordan:


Madaba is one of the oldest towns still existing that was mentioned in the Bible (Joshua 13 v9) as being part of the territory parcelled out by Moses to the Reubenites and the Gadites : "From Aroer, that is upon the bank of the river Arnon, and the city that is in the midst of the river and all the plain of Medeba unto Dibon". The land was taken from the Moabites, as is said in Numbers 21 v30: "Heshbon is perished, even unto Dibon and we have laid them waste even unto Nopha, which reacheth unto Medeba". This is indeed going a very long way back.

A street in Madaba, on the way to Greek orthodox church of St George, Madaba,  Jordan:
Dibon, incidentally, also still exists. Under the name of Dhiban it is the last town before Wadi Mujib (Nahal Arnon in Hebrew) when you go south on the Kings' Highway. There are numerous ruins and an important tell; it is here that the Mesha Stele was found in 1868. The stele recounts the rule of the "King Mesha" around 850BC and is now in the Louvre, but copies of it are displayed in museums all over Jordan, and you will find many references to it in histories of Jordan. See the webpage "The Mesha stele".

Carpet Street, Madaba, Jordan:

Madaba was an important town at the beginning of the Christian era, and had its own bishop. Imposing churches were built there, including the Cathedral, the Church of the Apostles, the Church of the Virgin and the Church of St Elianos as well as St George's (the famous "Church of the Map"). All of these churches were copiously decorated with mosaics, the finest dating from the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Because of the iconoclasts, few remain and many of those in poor condition. However, a number of mosaics have been moved to Madaba to the Museum there from other sites on the Madaba Plateau : the mosaic from the baths of Herod's citadel at Mukawir dates from the 1st century AD.

Madaba Tourism Directorate, Madaba, Jordan:
The Church of the Apostles in Madaba is a little bit away from the Old Town and the Mosaic Museum (or Archaeological Park). A special shelter has been built to protect the floor which has a gorgeous mosaic in the Centre, showing a collection of "dancing pigeons" which I find very attractive. I didn't see one couple of pigeons identical to another.

Here are two details of the work here: the beautiful medallion in the center of the floor shows a personification of the Sea. Notice the rudder held in the left hand. I am voluntarily showing copies made at the Mosaics School rather than the original which is both very difficult to take in photo and very dusty as you can see from the photo of the floor above. The colors show here much better and it is easier to appreciate the beauty of the work.

Carpet Street, Madaba, Jordan:
Mosaics, incidentally, could be useful as well as ornamental. In the Archaeological Park you can see the mosaic shown below at the entrance to one of the houses. It indicated that shoes should be removed! Note the outline of a sandal above the round bit, which you can see better on the larger scaled photo.

Shortly after the establishment of the Caliphate, Madaba was abandoned and its ruins were untouched for centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century, some Christian families in Kerak decided to move away from there, following trouble with their Moslem neighbors. They settled in Madaba, took over the lands and began to cultivate them and to construct their own houses and places of worship. The Islamic authorities allowed them to do so, but on condition that the Christian churches should only be built on the sites previously occupied by the Byzantine churches. This led to a general exploration of the town ruins, and the clearance of many buried churches. You will find many "modern" buildings on the ancient sites - in Madaba do not judge the age of a house or any building by its exterior!

Madaba visitors center, Madaba, Jordan:
Incidentally, Charl al Twal of the Mariam Hotel is a descendant of one of the first of these Christian families to move to Madaba and is happy to describe some of the experiences of these early settlers.

The clearance and rebuilding are still going on: new finds are regularly made in the town.

Hippolytus Hall was a rich Byzantine mansion, and the mosaic found there in 1982 beneath the present day Church of the Virgin is one of the treasures of Madaba.

The mosaic depicts the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus as dramatized by Euripides. On the right Aphrodite is seated beside Adonis, and is threatening with her slipper one of the Cupids presented to her by the Three Graces. On the left, a servant is carrying a basket of fruit and a dead partridge. One of the Cupids has his head in a beehive, a reference to a love poem by Theocritus.

Madaba visitors center, Madaba, Jordan:
Mount Nebo usually means the Moses Memorial Church and the viewpoint from outside it (see "Photos of Jordan - Mount Nebo"). The church is a simple one nowadays, but in the sixth century it was the church for a important monastery with all that this implies. In particular, the floor was covered with mosaics of different periods.

The mosaic shown above dates from 597AD when the church was rebuilt and greatly enlarged. Again the left and right hand photos are details of the central one. Today it is displayed on the wall.

The mosaic on the left was discovered when the 597AD was removed for cleaning. A perfectly beautiful mosaic, dating from 531AD it shows four panels of scenes of hunting and husbandry.

Madaba Tourism Directorate, Madaba, Jordan:
The animals are beautifully depicted, and notice (in the enlargement) the peasant sitting under a tree while his charges graze.

The animal at the bottom is a bit weird, something of a mixture of a zebra and perhaps a giraffe? Presumably the artist had seen neither.

This village just off the road from Madaba to Mount Nebo is mostly neglected by tourists, but it contains one of the most beautiful mosaics discovered in Jordan, almost perfectly preserved. A shelter has been built to protect it in the ruins of the church of St Lot and St Procopius. It is pity that no public transport goes to Khirbet al Mukhayyat.

Again I show two details of the complete mosaic and with them you can better appreciate how impressive the mosaic is.

Some other mosaics have been found there but are not on general display - see the page on the Madaba Plateau.

Archeological Park of Madaba, Virgin Mary Church, Madaba, Jordan:
Most of the mosaics of Transjordan date from between the 1st century and the eighth century AD. Mosaics were used in many buildings to decorate walls, floors or ceilings, employing motifs mostly from everyday life : harvesting, hunting, fishing or just pastoral or mythological themes. Church mosaics often depicted stories from the Bible.


Sadly, with the decree of the Emperor Leo in AD726, forbidding the use of people and animals in "images" ("God is the only creator") most of these mosaics were badly defaced. Those which survive today more or less intact, are almost always the mosaics which had been hidden by a later mosaic built above them. Otherwise all too often we see a mosaic with pastoral scenes or vignettes, but with the people hammered out. This is just as frustrating as you might imagine: a beautiful scene, and a big hole in the middle!

The Greek orthodox church of St George, Madaba,  Jordan:
This decree applied chiefly to churches, and the majority of the mosaics we can see today were found in Byzantine churches. Archaeologists digging in the ruins of churches in Jordan are accustomed to finding thousands of multicoloured glass tiles, which shows the extent of the mosaic decorations of the period. Ceilings and floors covered in brightly coloured pictures - they must have been beautiful!

In Madaba the best known mosaic is the map of the Holy Land to be seen in the Church of St George. The great majority of visitors stop here for half an hour or so and nowhere else in Madaba, which is a pity. The central part of the map focuses on the City of Jerusalem.

Madaba visitors center, Madaba, Jordan:
The mosaic Map of Madaba was discovered in 1896 and was immediately recognised as an outstanding discovery. It was published a year later. This discovery drew upon the city the attention of scholars worldwide. It also positively influenced the inhabitants who shared the contagious passion of Brother Giuseppe Manfredi to whose efforts we owe the discovery of most of the mosaics in the city.

What you see there today is just a remnant of the original mosaic which measured over 16m long by 6m wide and which depicted most of the present day Near East from Lebanon to the Nile Delta and from the Mediterranean to the eastern desert of Jordan. It dates from the sixth century and besides decorating the church was probably intended to help pilgrims making their way from one holy site to another. St George's Church is, of course, a modern church, and the original Byzantine building was much larger. This mosaic must have taken years to make.

The Greek orthodox church of St George, Madaba,  Jordan:
The Madaba Mosaic Map is a unique piece of art realised in 6th cent. A.D. as a decoration for the pavement of a church in the town of Madaba (Jordan) in the Byzantine Near East. At that time Madaba was part of the so called Provincia Arabia, and was inhabited by Aramaic speaking Christians descendant from the ancient biblical people of the Moabites. The mosaic was discovered accidentally about one hundred years ago (in 1897) while constructing a new church for the Greek-Orthodox Arab community, which was then settling on the very ruins of the ancient town of Madaba.

Copy of the mosaic map at Greek orthodox church of st George  Madaba' Jordan shows all the places of holy land, Madaba,  Jordan:
The mosaic represents the biblical land from Egypt to Lebanon, including Sinai, Israel, Palestine, and Transjordan. Unfortunately the northern sector is almost completely lost, and the rest suffered a lot of damage too. The original panel would have measured about 94 square meter but only 25 are still preserved. What remains is still of the greatest importance for art, history and biblical topography. The city of Jerusalem is depicted with the uppermost care but a total of 156 places or biblical memoirs are present in the preserved portion of the map.

Copy of the mosaic map at Greek orthodox church of st George  Madaba' Jordan shows all the places of holy land, Madaba,  Jordan:
The mosaicist conceived and carried out his masterwork with great topographical skill and biblical knowledge. The Madaba Mosaic map is deemed by some scholars to be the best topographic representation ever done before modern cartography. As a source of biblical topography the map is fully comparable with the well-known treatise on the biblical places written in Greek about 395 A.D. by the historian Eusebius of Caesarea and translated into Latin by Jerome about 490 A.D.

Our aim is to present the richness of this little known masterpiece of art , religion and science to all people interested in the biblical places or just in the best achievements of humanity.

Copy of the mosaic map at Greek orthodox church of st George  Madaba' Jordan shows all the places of holy land, Madaba,  Jordan:
Details of the Map:


SECTION 1
Phoenicia and Galilee:

The two captions of Phoenicia had been noticed, towards the northern wall of the church even before the discovery of the Map... All we can see of what Galilee was a small fragment of mountain with two uncaptioned vignettes and one more vignette accompanied with the caption Agbaron


SECTION 2
The Jordan Valley:

The geological depression (Ghor in Arabic) that separates the mountain of Palestine from the trans Jordanian plateau is characterized in the Map by the meandering course of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea basin.



This region, with its tropical climate, is defined by various topographic symbols: palm trees at the oases of Jericho, Betagla Archelais and at the spas at Calliroe and Zoara; bushes by the banks of the river, to define their inaccessibility due to the thick vegetation (kikkar hayarden in the Hebrew biblical text zor or ghowier in arabic); the pulley driven ferries to indicate the fording spots on the river. The inhospitable desert nature of great part of the Ghor is depicted by a lion (disfigured by iconoclasts) chasing a gazelle. Fish are represented in the rivers thus depicting the life supporting waters of the river as opposed to the lifeless brackish waters of the Dead Sea. Look-out towers with ladders to access them are also common.


SECTION 3
On the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, where the river Jordan comes to an end, and laying between two valleys (wadi), positively identified as the wadi Zerqa Ma'in and wadi Mujib-Arnon, one sees two spas: at Baaru (modern-day Hammamat Ma'in) depicted as being inside the mountain and the thermal baths of Kalliroe (today's Zara) pride of the Madaba region. 

Here, apart from the two little palm trees that indicate the oasis, there are also indicated three springs whose waters are gathered in basins. The water of the southernmost spring sprouts directly from the mountain before ending up in the sea like the other two. On his dead bed, King Herod came to the hot waters of Calliroe in search of relief from his pains.

SECTION 4
Moab and Edom:

The mosaicist underlined the mountainous nature of the land of Moab, to the east of the Dead sea, locked between the wadi Mujib-Arnon to the north and the wadi Hesa-Zared to the south.


SECTION 5
Mount Ephraim and Benjamin;

Laying between the present northern limit of the central fragment of the map and the vignette depicting Jerusalem we find the territory of the tribe of Ephraim (Lot of Ephraim) and Benjamin (Lot of Benjamin). The mosaicist quotes the biblical text containing the patriarchal blessing.


SECTION 6
Mountain of Judah and the Shephelah:

South of Jerusalem, the mountain of the Tribe of Judah from Bethlehem to Hebron, is definitely distinguishable graphically from Shephelah, the low hills situated between the central mountain and the Mediterranean coast. The localities are ideally set along two roads that are still used to this day.


SECTION 7
The Sea-Coast:

The places that lie between the Mediterranean sea and the Palestinian mountains are distributed on a relatively wide section of the Map. The northernmost city is Lord also Lydea also Diospolis.


SECTION 8
The Arabah and the Negev:

Three roman forts, Praesidium, Thamara and Moa have been placed by the mosaicist in the valley of Arabah to the south of the Dead Sea. These forts guarded the roads which joined the edomite territory to the Palestinian coast crossing the Negev which is graphically represented by three isolated mountains.


SECTION 9
Ascalon, Gaza, Negev and Sinai

In an isolated fragment of the mosaic there has been preserved the port of Askalon on the Palestinian coast. The vignette of the city shows a network of colonnaded and porticoed roads. Outside the city walls there is the shrine of the Egyptian Martyrs, Ares, Promos and Elijah, which was venerated by the pilgrims.

SECTION 10
The Sinai Desert and Egypt:

The mosaicist of Madaba synthesized graphically the Sinai Peninsula with a mountain situated between the Negev in Palestine and the Egyptian Delta. Three troponins refer to as many incidents during the exodus.

Two occur close to the mountain: Raphidim where Israel fought Amalek who was attacking. Desert of Zin where the manna and the quails were sent. The third in the valley of Arabah; Desert where the serpent of bronze saved the Israelites

SECTION 11
Jerusalem:

(Note: Jerusalem site still under construction)
Walls are visible around the big cities, including Jerusalem, Jericho, and Ashdod. Jerusalem is the focus of the map. Clearly visible are the north-south Cardo and valley streets (lined with columns), the Damascus Gate plaza and pillar, the city walls, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church of Holy Zion (Hagia Sion), and Justinian's "Nea" Church

The Real Geography of the Madaba Map:
It is most interesting that following the depiction on this map of the "Baptism Site of Christ" excavations were undertaken and the site of Bethany was uncovered, exactly on the site shown on the map!

Here you can see a detail of the River Jordan, with what is possibly a bridge or at least a crossing point between the two banks. A detail often remarked on is the fish, which arriving close to the Dead Sea turn and swim back again - no fish are shown swimming in the Dead Sea which at that time was just as salty and unsuitable for fish as it is today.

Notice too that just north of the bridge, the (presumably) hunters have been erased by the iconoclasts. No attempt has been made to restore them, since we have no idea what they actually looked like. A mixture of mosaic tiles has been put in place.

There is a most interesting website about the mosaic map, largely based on the work of Father Michele Piccirillo of the Franciscan Institute at Mount Nebo. 




Antony Varghese Kanappilly
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