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The King's Highway, the Desert Highway, and Central

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The King's Highway, the Desert Highway, and Central ARAM, 8 (1996), 89-99 89 THE KING’S HIGHWAY, THE DESERT HIGHWAY, AND CENTRAL JORDAN’S KERAK PLATEAU GERALD L. MATTINGLY According to the Book of Numbers, Moses sought permission from the Edomite and Amorite kings for the Hebrews to pass through their territories on the Transjordanian plateau, Num. 20:17 records Moses’ appeal to the king of Edom: “Now let us pass through your land. We will not pass through field or vineyard, neither will we drink water from a well; we will go along the King’s Highway, we will not turn aside to the right hand or to the left, until we have passed through your territory.”1 The same appeal was made to Sihon, king of the Amorites, who ruled the region north of Wadi Mujib (the biblical Arnon): “Let me pass through your land; we will not turn aside into field or vineyard; we will not drink the water of a well; we will go by the King’s Highway, until we have passed through your terri- tory” (21:22). In the last part of the ninth century B.C., the Mesha Inscription noted that this Moabite king was vitally interested in the strategic road network of his ter- ritory. Mesha’s kingdom was located on the same stretch of the Transjordan- ian highlands as visited by Moses’ followers. In line 26 of his famous memo- rial stone, King Mesha boasted: “I carried out repairs at Aroer, and I mended the highway at the Arnon.”2 One of the best known Roman milestones from Trajan’s Via Nova, constructed between A.D. 111-114,3 reported how this emperor “having reduced Arabia to the status of a province, opened up and paved a new road, through the agency of the emperor’s legate C. Claudius Severus, from the boundaries of Syria as far as the Red Sea.”4 Like the texts mentioned above, this Latin text reflects the impor- tance of the ancient route that ran north-south across the tableland of central Jor- dan. The general purpose of this paper is to examine the various roads that have, in fact, made the Kerak plateau, the district between the Mujib and Wadi el-Hesa, a strategic crossroads for the history and culture of Transjordan – and for the Lev- ant as a whole. More specifically, I will draw attention to a natural corridor in the 1 All biblical citations in this paper come from the Revised Standard Version. 2 J.C.L. Gibson, Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, Volume I: Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions, (Oxford, 1971), 77. On p. 82, Gibson notes that this “reference is to the portion of the King’s Highway which passed over the Arnon close to Aroer….” 3 B. Beitzel, et al., “Roads and Highways,” in D.N. Freedman et al. (eds.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 5, (New York, 1992), 783. 4 L. Keppie, Understanding Roman Inscriptions, (Baltimore, 1991), 69. 90 KING'S HIGHWAY, DESERT HIGHWAY, CENTRAL JORDAN'S KERAK PLATEAU southeastern corner of the plateau and discuss a new archaeological project which will investigate the significance of this route. EVIDENCE AVAILABLE FOR THE THE STUDY OF ANCIENT ROUTES In his monumental study, The Roads and Highways of Ancient Israel,5 David Dorsey has presented a wealth of material on the road system of Iron Age Israel. The methodology used in this reconstruction is as important as the final product, and – as Joffe suggested in a recent review – it is hoped that someone will produce a similar analysis of Transjordan’s Iron Age roads.6 My paper presents some preliminary information toward that end, a hint of what awaits some patient scholar, but I have considered most of the same factors in this survey of roads in the Kerak region. After he considered a number of issues under the heading “The Nature of Roads in Ancient Israel” (a 51-page chapter), Dorsey supplemented Aha- roni’s7 list of resources that are important in reconstructing “bygone roads.” Dorsey names four kinds of resources: (1) historical sources; (2) archaeology; (3) later routes; and (4) geographical and topographical conditions.8 For our purposes, the historical sources include the Bible, Egyptian and Assyrian sources, ancient maps, Roman milestones, and accounts by early travelers. Of course, in any discussion of roads the topography plays a primary role, and – as Aharoni noted – the “broken landscape” in Palestine and Transjordan lim- its the routes available to travelers.9 I would suggest that Israel Roll, an author- ity on the Roman roads in this region, offers a valuable set of criteria by which we can think about roads from the ancient perspective. He identifies six factors which contributed to the construction of roads in antiquity: (1) natural geo- graphic factors (e.g., terrain, type of soil and rock, water sources); (2) human geographic factors (i.e., population distribution and density); (3) economic factors; (4) geo-political factors (which dictated the purpose of the road net- work, the routes followed, and the resources invested in its construction and maintenance); (5) the region’s geographical location; and (6) the means of travel and level of technology.10 With this set of criteria in mind, let us turn 5 D.A. Dorsey, The Roads and Highways of Ancient Israel, (Baltimore, 1991). This volume is the published version of Dorsey’s Ph.D. dissertation, which was completed at Dropsie University in 1981. 6 A.H. Joffe, Review of David A. Dorsey’s The Roads and Highways of Ancient Israel, Jour- nal of Near Eastern Studies, 54/3 (July 1995), 232-234. 7 Y. Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography, rev. ed. (revised and translated by A. F. Rainey), (Philadelphia, 1979), 45. 8 Dorsey, Roads and Highways, 52-56. 9 Aharoni, Land of the Bible, 43. 10 I. Roll, “The Roman Road System in Judaea,” in L. A. Levine (ed.), The Jerusalem Cathe- dra, Vol. 3, (Detroit, 1983), 137-138. G.L. MATTINGLY 91 our attention to the function of Jordan in the trade and travel network of the Near East. JORDAN AND CENTRAL JORDAN – CROSSROADS OF NEAR EASTERN TRAVEL The title of Peter Gubser’s popular study of the Hashemite Kingdom, Jor- dan – Crossroads of Middle Eastern Events,11 is a fair representation of the importance attached to the region included in the modern nation of Jordan. Though it never achieved the sophistication of the great ancient Near Eastern centers of power and culture, this territory has played a vital role in the trans- port of products and troops and the dissemination of ideas down through the ages. The Transjordan has provided passage to goods and people through such activities as trade (ancient and modern), warfare, and pilgrimage. Another book on modern Jordan, this one written by Kamal Salibi,12 pro- vides a good overview of the routes which have contributed to this region’s economic significance, from ancient until modern times. Salibi observes that the highlands of Palestine merge with Sinai and were oriented in the direction of Egypt, while the highlands of Transjordan merge with the mountains of the Hijaz in Western Arabia. Thus, Palestine is the “natural point of connection between Syria and Egypt,” and Transjordan is the “natural point of connection between Syria and Arabia.” Travelers going to Syria and Arabia, respectively, spoke of the territory of present-day Jordan as masharif al-Sham (“the approaches of Syria”) and masharif al-Hijaz (“the approaches of the Hijaz”). Ancient caravaneers “followed the natural configurations of the land in differ- ent areas to reach their Syrian destinations.” One important trail passed through the Wadi Sirhan, while others converged on Ma{an to form a major line of travel, the so-called “King’s Highway,” which continued northward through Transjordan’s hills into Syria.13 In one of the classic studies on Transjordan’s history and archaeology, The Other Side of the Jordan, Nelson Glueck had, in fact, already drawn attention to this east-of-the-Rift-Valley orientation. His language was less sophisticated than that of Salibi, but Glueck was making the same assessment when he observed that “the orientation of Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Gilead, for eco- nomic and geographical reasons may be said to be chiefly to the north and south rather than to the west, that is mainly to Syria and Arabia rather than to Palestine.”14 This hypothesis has been tested through much archaeological research, where the realia of the ancient world meet the literary evidence, but 11 P. Gubser, Jordan–Crossroads of Middle Eastern Events, (London, 1983). 12 K. Salibi, The Modern History of Jordan, (New York, 1993). 13 Salibi, History of Jordan, 6-7. 14 N. Glueck, The Other Side of the Jordan, rev. ed., (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 180-181. 92 KING'S HIGHWAY, DESERT HIGHWAY, CENTRAL JORDAN'S KERAK PLATEAU there is a need for further explicit inquiry into the nature of cultural and mate- rial exchange between Syria, Jordan, and Arabia.15 Of course, the South Arabian trade has been the subject of a number of tex- tually-oriented studies, including those Van Beek,16 Groom,17 and Crone.18 In his discussion of the role of trade in Iron Age Edom’s political development, Bienkowski reminds us that “the question of the Arabian trade is a tricky one,” since “real evidence for the actual routes of the Arabian trade… comes almost entirely from later written sources.”19 In his classic article on the routes of Arabian luxury trade, Van Beek, always the cautious scholar, states cate- gorically “although not specifically mentioned in the literature, one branch must have followed the ‘king’s highway’ through Transjordan, and another route probably branched off at Teima, en route to Mesopotamia.”20 And on the basis of another kind of evidence, a comparison of the ceramic traditions from ancient Edom and Northwest Arabia, Parr finds merit in the suggestion that Northwest Arabia was an “integral part” of “greater Edom.”21 In the texts we read at the beginning of this paper, it became obvious that central Jordan was a crossroads for many centuries in antiquity.
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