#ajlun

The ruins of the Roman city of Jerash are not included in the Jordan tour, so I arrange a driver for the day to go there. As long as I had the car and driver I added a stop at the Castle of Ajlun.

Breakfast here starts at 7:30 so I asked to start at 8:00. That was good for a couple of reasons: we were out of the city before traffic got bad, and at Jerash before many of the tour buses showed up, and we were done by midafternoon, so the temperatures were reasonable.

Amman, with a population of over 4,000,000, is big and sprawls. I can see at peak periods traffic would be terrible.

Our first stop was the Castle of Ajlun. It sits on a mountaintop at 1250 meters and has a commanding view of the countryside.

It was built by the Arabs in 1185, destroyed by the Mongols in 1260, and they rebuilt by the Arabs. There was a suprising number of large rooms inside.

Then we headed to the ruins of the Roman town of Jerash.

The town was laid out in about AD 70 by the Romans and and was occupied through the Byzantine era. It was one of the ten cities of the Decapolis. (Actually no one knows which towns the ten cities were. It just became the name of the region, and is mentioned in the Bible as such.)

It is one of the best preserved Roman ruins and it is certainly easy to understand the layout of the public areas of the city. You enter through the Triumphal Arch erected in 129AD for Hadrian's visit. (He actually stayed for almost a year.)

Also at the south end is the Hippodrome. The arches around the curve of the south end, and some of the stands are still standing, so it's easy to understand the construction.

The shell shaped arches supported the stands and provided spaces below.

There was the mosaic floor of a small Christian church nearby.

At this point I hadn't realized the number and size of the churches in town. It was an interesting mix of temples to Artemis, Zeus and others and Christian churches including a cathedral.

There is a large oval plaza surrounded by columns with doric capitols.

The main street heads straight north off the end of the plaza and runs all the way through town with colonnades on both sides.

Along this street are located the various temple, markets and churches and additional gates.

As an engineer I was very interested that they found a room under one building that had a waterway through it powering a waterwheel. The wheel used arms to power saws to cut stone. It's one of the earliest such mechanical devices found. A university built reconstruction of the mechanism.

The layout of the churches and temples was a lot easier to understand in person than from photos. The third dimension really helps.

There is a theater at both ends of town, both well preserved.

Strategically situated by the snack shop was this orange tabby that looks like the poor cousin of our guys. (Skinnier and scruffier but knows where the food is.)