The Forgotten Roman Ruins of the ‘Pompeii of the Middle East’

Summary

When the German explorer Ulrich Jasper Seetzen stumbled upon a set of ruins near the Jordanian capital of Amman in 1806, little did he know that he had just discovered one of the largest and best-preserved ancient cities in the world. Today, this city, called Jerash, is often described as the “Pompeii of the Middle East.” It also ranks as the country’s second most popular tourist destination after Petra. Archaeologists believe that Jerash was founded sometime during the 2nd century B.C.E. A popular story goes that its name stems from the Greek word gerasmenos, meaning “elderly people,” a reference to the veteran soldiers who were allowed to settle there as a reward for serving in the armies of Alexander the Great. Academic consensus now converges on another story, one which holds that Jerash—also known as Antiochia ad Chrysorrhoam, or “Antioch beside the river of gold”—was actually founded by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a descendant of one of Alexander’s generals. Ruins of the Southern Theater at Jerash. Photo by Wirestock via Getty Images. Located around 27 miles north of Amman, Jerash was built along the King’s Highway, a Bronze Age trading route that ran from Egypt to India. Like most other cities straddling this route, Jerash was as wealthy as it was culturally diverse. Its population, which is thought to have peaked at around 20,000 individuals, hailed from places as distant as Persia and Palmyra, and spoke everything from Greek to Aramaic. Most of the surviving architecture in Jerash dates from the city’s Roman period, which began when Pompey the Great conquered Jordan on behalf of the Republic in 63 B.C.E. The Temple of Zeus, a 300-foot-long oval forum perched atop a hill and flanked by Corinthian columns, was erected around 162 C.E. At that time, the Republic had morphed into an empire, and was then being ruled by Marcus Aurelius. The nearby Southern Theater, an amphitheater following the classical Greek example, was constructed several decades earlier, during t...