Rise and fall

Jordanian ruins

IIn Jordan we found clues to the fall of the Roman Empire. Here, 2,000 years ago, the Romans had changed an Arabian town into a deliberately Romanesque Mediterranean centre with public baths, fountains, colonnaded streets and theatres with VIP seats. They even changed the name of the town from the Arabic Garshu to the Roman Gerasa. It is now known as Jerash. Clearly, the Romans believed that their culture was supreme and had to be imposed on all other people.

We drove the 48 km from Jordan’s capital to Jerash, parked in a lot above the Wadi Jerash stream, strode up an inclined road, got a glimpse of the modern town massed below, and stepped into 50 AD . This is, reputedly, ‘the world’s best-preserved Roman provincial city’, designed by skilled Roman architects and engineers. And it looked down on the city of the Arabs.

Visually, the most impressive place in this ancient Roman town in Jordan is the Oval Plaza ringed by a colonnade of Ionic pillars. This was, clearly, a public meeting place — a concourse — where citizens exercised briskly in the morning, met and conversed through the day and strolled around and relaxed in the evening. Presumably, this was also the place where disgruntled citizens met to express their ire with the exorbitant price of Indian textiles and their society women who flaunted these see-through fabrics.

Stretching out from the Oval Plaza is the impressive Colonnaded Street. This main thoroughfare of Jerash still carried the marks of chariot wheels, the preferred vehicles of those days. Broad pavements once held shops, and we noticed stone manholes to drain water into underground sewers. Presumably, there were no flooded roads in the Roman city of Jerash because it all washed down to the Arab town at the bottom of the hill!

Halfway up this road, in the elite Roman settlement, the columns became broader. This was the entrance to the Macellum, a covered marketplace: appreciably more organised than a bazaar or a gallery of street-shops. We noticed that lying around the ruins of Jerash were acanthus capitals carved with the stylised leaves of a prickly desert shrub growing wild in the Mediterranean lands.

The Roman obsession with columns and commemorative arches was expressed in Hadrian’s Arch. It was massive and assertive, honouring the visit of Emperor Hadrian in 129 AD. It was meant to remind lesser mortals of the might of distant Rome and its empire. Historians estimate that, at one time, every fourth person in the known world lived and died in the Roman Empire. This gave the Romans a false sense of righteousness and invincibility. Even so, their more sensitive leaders had begun to feel the rumblings of discontent. Their economy was static.

They imported more from the east than they exported. They were forced to take the short-term solution of decreasing the amount of silver in their currency, the modern equivalent of hurriedly printing paper-money, further adding to their problems. They also reacted the way dictatorships often have. When they couldn’t give their citizens bread, they gave them circuses and dazzling tamashas to distract them from their growing problems.

Dome for dramas

These measures are frequently used, but as short-term diversions employed by desperate rulers to draw people’s attention away from bad governance, corruption and the other ailments of a top-down society. Jerash had its Hippodome. This enormous arena could hold 15,000 frenzied spectators as the charioteers raced around whipping their steeds, making and breaking fortunes in this trading town. Moreover, in those uncertain days, the movers and shakers of the economy had as much need to be protected as they have today. We walked past the massive City Walls and through the South Gate.

Then we came to a monument that must have been very appealing in its time: the Nymphaeum. This beautiful fountain, with its red bowl, was dedicated to those graceful, semi-divine women, the Nymphs. It must have been a source of as much transient delight as the Trevi and other sculpted fountains in Rome are today. Sadly, that other monument to the Roman obsession with water, the West Baths, collapsed in the great earthquake of January 749 AD and was never rebuilt. Clearly, civic services, which were the pride of Roman civilisation in its heyday, were crumbling under the growing burden of a weakening economy and mounting discontent.

For some strange reason, neither the North nor the South Theatre seemed to have been damaged by that seismic disturbance. The North Theatre was smaller and could have been used for civic meetings and not only for theatre.

The South Theatre’s stage has been reconstructed and the acoustics are still superb as we heard when a bagpiper and drummer, in Bedouin robes, filled the air with their music. Though an American tourist loudly questioned the existence of bagpipes at the time that the theatre had been built, he was wrong. Bagpipes could have been moaning and groaning as far back as 100 BC. But even in those distant days, some people were more equal than others: their stone seats were reserved, and Greek letters were inscribed on them to make sure that others did not occupy those privileged, high-status places.

Such symbols of inequality further widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots of Roman society. No amount of staged entertainments in amphitheatres could divert the attention of the common people from the arrogance of their rulers. The Roman Empire collapsed like a rotten apple.

Fall of pride

That was many centuries ago and its effect was felt in distant Jordan. As Jerash showed us, a self-destruct mechanism seems to be built into all dictatorships. Hubris is the cancer that breeds in the heart of societies obsessed with their own exclusiveness. But neither the goose-stepping Nazis of Hitler nor the blind apparatchiks of Stalin heeded the lessons of Roman history.

As philosopher George Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Jerash is a beautiful and haunting reminder of that harsh truth.


Fact file

Getting there

Fly to Amman, the capital of Jordan. From there, Jerash is 48 km by road.

Getting around

Taxis or hired cars.

Accommodation

It is best to make Amman the base for day trips to interesting places around. The capital has hotels to suit all budgets.
For more information, visit:
www.visitjordan.com