Rome in the East by Ball Warwick;

Author:Ball, Warwick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4556450
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

5 The countryside

‘There is no other country in the world where the architectural monuments of antiquity have been preserved in such large numbers, in such perfection, and in so many varieties as in Northern Central Syria and in the Hauran.’ This was written by Howard Crosby Butler, the leader of the American Archaeological Expedition to Syria at the end of the nineteenth century.1 The region west and south-west of Aleppo is one of the most extraordinary areas of ruins and probably the greatest storehouse of late Roman architecture to be found in the world. This region is known as the Dead Cities, the remains of an astonishing eight hundred deserted towns, villages and monastic settlements in the hill country between Aleppo, Antioch and Apamaea.2 Buildings are very well preserved and the villages often have the ancient field and road systems surrounding them intact. In this extraordinary landscape it is still possible to wander along streets, into modest houses or grander villas and churches that in many cases are almost perfectly preserved, with only their roofs missing, to obtain one of the most perfect – and most enchanting – pictures of the world of late antiquity to be found anywhere (Figure 5.1, Plates 5.1 and 5.2).

This appears now to be just one part of a general expansion and upsurge in prosperity and population in the Roman east of late antiquity. A century after Butler’s remarks, David Kennedy writes of the area of north-western Jordan: ‘Never before had the region been as urbanized and as densely extensively settled. Nor was it again to reach such levels until the twentieth century – perhaps not until the 1950s’ and Doran Bar writes of Palestine: ‘During this period [between the fourth and seventh centuries] population and settlement density had reached a level to which this region returned only at the beginning of the twentieth century.3 Surveys from the Plain of Antioch and the Plain of Madaba to the semi-desert areas of Syria, Jordan and the Negev are revealing a similar high levels of settlement in the countryside. Clearly, the great cities of the Empire which have claimed such a disproportionate amount of study in the past are only a part of the picture, perhaps a small part at that.4

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