Bosra and the South

chapter 7 Bosra and the South Bosra Roman Bozrah . was a beautiful city, with long straight avenues and spacious thoroughfares; but the Saracens built their miserable little shops and quaint irregular houses along the sides of the streets, out and in, here and there, as fancy or funds directed; and they thus converted the stately Roman capital, as they did Damascus and Antioch, into a labyrinth of narrow, crooked, gloomy lanes.[1] [1865] Bosra,[2] 140km south of Damascus, the main town in the Hauran, and a site investigated by today’s archaeologists,1 was in ancient times the centre of a rich and prosperous agricultural region, and well endowded with monuments including temples, theatre, hippodrome and amphitheatre, the main area pro- tected by walls. Its towers were visible for miles around,[3] but some travellers believed it had been more affected by earthquakes than other sites.[4] The imprint of the hippodrome may be seen from the Ayyubid Citadel, itself built round the Roman theatre, and presumably using very large quantities of blocks from the amphitheatre, barely 30m distant. This is only known to us from recent excavation, and no early travellers mention it, so either the Ayyubid builders must have stripped it to the foundations, or earlier inhabitants must have used its blocks for churches and houses. In any case, by the 20th century, the site was covered in modern houses and gardens. Since amphitheatres were so often turned into fortresses in post-Roman times, it is likely the structure had been partly robbed out well before the Ayyubids. Abulfeda [d.1331] noted the strength of the fortress, and the dour basalt: “les maisons sont construites en pierres noires qui servent également à les recouvrir.”[5] The scenae frons of the theatre was largely buried under later housing until clearance began after the Second World War.[6] In 1812 Burckhardt saw the remains of Bosra’s town walls, and noted that it was “at present the last inhabited place in the south-east extremity of the Haouran . The S. and S.E. quarters are covered with ruins of private dwell- ings, the walls of many of which are still standing, but most of the roofs have fallen in.”[7] As a demonstration of his limitations in architectural history, here 1 Contribution française 1989, 133–141. © Michael Greenhalgh, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004334601_009 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Michael Greenhalgh - 9789004334601 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:47:04PM via free access 288 CHAPTER 7 is his description of the fortress, describing the gallery at the top, but not realis- ing that it was a Roman theatre: Its walls are very thick, and in the interior are alleys, dark vaults, sub- terraneous passages, &c. of the most solid construction. What distin- guishes it from other Syrian castles, is that on the top of it there is a gallery of short pillars, on three sides, and on the fourth side are several niches in the wall, without any decorations; many of the pillars are still standing.[8] Richter arrived three years later, and easily picked out the theatre encased in the citadel. He got an excellent welcome, because Westerners so rarely came to the region.[9] Buckingham was delighted by the theatre, but did not know whether the fortress which enclosed it2 was Roman (and hence the theatre built for the garrison!), or a later addition.[10] Not least perhaps because it had once been a church,[11] he was confused by the Mosque of Umar, which was a large building entirely constructed out of the ruins of more ancient edi- fices. In some parts of this were seen columns of white marble in one solid shaft; in others, pillars of black basalt, formed out of several distinct pieces, and curious capitals of different ages, orders, and materials,[12] and spotted nearby a large fragment of a stone door from an earlier building.[13] No wonder he was confused, for the structure was probably a jumbled ruin as a result of the 1822 earthquake: Lindsay reported in 1838 that only a metre or so of the colonnades was visible, with several columns of beautiful variegated marble, and, from inscriptions on the shafts, have evidently been pillaged from some Christian church. The view from the minaret is very fine; you enter the staircase by an ancient stone door, adopted from some Roman house.[14] Adjacent was a hamman, but its remains were not explicable until after World War II.3 In 1855 Porter must have clambered carefully around the piles of 2 Yovitchitch 2004 for the citadel; Piana 2008, 170 Abb. 3 for fortressing of the theatre at Bosra, from 12thC. to 1251, and its infill, reckoned at 1240. 3 Meinecke 1991: Hamman Manjak at Bosra, with rooms incorporating opus sectile or marble mosaic. Meinecke & Aalund 2005 for the city’s architecture and archaeology. Excavating the site required the removal of c2m fill – over 600 cubic metres of blocks, rubble, earth etc. Michael Greenhalgh - 9789004334601 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:47:04PM via free access Bosra and the South 289 columns in the mosque, for he repeated what Lindsay saw.[15] Lindsay also admired some of the “Saracenic additions” wrapped around the theatre,[16] the houses within which “communicate with the exterior fortress by the ancient galleries of the theatre.”[17] Seetzen didn’t even realise the innards were a theatre: he thought they were “die Reste eines schönen grossen Palais.”[18] Monk visited Bosra in 1851, finding most of it “wholly deserted,” with some 230 people living to the south east (i.e. with access to water in the same res- ervoir that fed the fortress). But they lived “in caves and underground dwell- ings, beneath the ruined houses, not one of which has been repaired, although abundance of materials lie scattered around.” Why? This was attributed to habit, natural indolence, and lack of interest in comfort, so “they look with the greatest unconcern upon the ruined palaces of Bozra.”[19] Indeed, the place continued to be semi-deserted: The surrounding plain is desolate, the walls are broken and ruinous, the mosques roofless, the houses shattered to their foundations; and we have to ride far in through piles of ruins, and over mounds of rubbish, ere we can find the half-dozen families who call Bozrah their home.[20] And this was a city which once housed some hundred thousand![21] While the old paved streets in other centre had been cleared by mid-century, in Bosra this had not happened. In 1824 Richter’s horse had difficulty picking its way “au milieu des rues étroites remplies de fragmens, de débris de siècles et de peu- ples nombreux, et où quelques habitans vivent dans des espèces de trous.”[22] Nothing had changed decades later, Porter writing in 1865 that “the streets are mostly covered, and in some places completely blocked up, with fallen build- ings and heaps of rubbish. Over these I had to climb, risking my limbs among loose stones.” Perhaps the population was so small and troglodytic because of the ever-present danger of marauding Bedouin.[23] An important structure was the circle-in-square cathedral church of SS Sergius, Leontius and Bacchus (built 511–512). In 1812 Burckhardt wrote that “several beautiful sculptured friezes are inserted in the wall, but I was unable to discover from whence they had been taken.”[24] Richter described it accurately in 1824, including chapels and doors.[25] The drum to the central dome is still seen in De Vogüé’s print; and Seetzen, in 1854, mentions the dome, and also frescoes in the choir.[26] Much of the structure had collapsed by 1900, probably due to mining of its blocks for building materials. If Bosra was near-deserted in the mid-19th century, so was the surrounding area, and Porter, writing in 1865, takes his usual perverse delight in proving the topicality of the Bible: Michael Greenhalgh - 9789004334601 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:47:04PM via free access 290 CHAPTER 7 I cannot tell how deeply I was impressed when looking out over that noble plain, rivalling in richness of soil the best of England’s counties, thickly studded with cities, towns, and villages, intersected with roads, having one of the finest climates in the world; and yet utterly deserted, literally “without man, without inhabitant, and without beast” (Isa. xxxiii. 10). I cannot tell with what mingled feelings of sorrow and of joy, of mourning and of thanksgiving, of fear and of faith, I reflected on the history of that land; and taking out my Bible compared its existing state, as seen with my own eyes, with the numerous predictions regarding it written by the Hebrew prophets. In their day it was populous and prosperous; the fields waved with corn; the hill-sides were covered with flocks and herds; the highways were thronged with wayfarers; the cities resounded with the continuous din of a busy population. And yet they wrote as if they had seen the land as I saw it from the ramparts of Bozrah.[27] An important point already made deserves repeating here. Porter directly links Hauran villages from Biblical times to 1865. How could he believe that such settlements in a country taken over by Muslims and then invaded by Crusaders could have no history in the intervening seventeen hundred years? Surely his readers would have been better informed had he been conscious of the various ups and downs that did indeed happen to such settlements over the centu- ries? We cannot know what evidence his blinkered attitude missed, but we can be certain that his accounts lack detail that a greater ecumenism would have provided.

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