The magical ambience of Jerash transports one into a zone in which two periods of time blend. An awareness of the present blends with a vaguely present past
Though Petra is perhaps the best known of Jordan’s tourist destinations, there are other places that draw large numbers. One of them is Jerash, 53.9 kilometres from Amman, the country’s capital, via Al-Urdon St and Route 35, which takes from 45 minutes to an hour’s drive. It is less imposing scale and structure than Petra, but is almost 2,000 years old, having built after Roman Emperor Trajan’s conquest of Jordan in 106 AD, and bearing the stamp of three periods, Greek, ancient Roman and Byzantine.
The two monuments that one sees at the very outset are the arch built to commemorate Emperor’s visit in 129 AD and the ruins of the Hippodrome. Inside the city, which, this writer feels, is best to enter through the reconstructed, South Gate, one walks into an oval-shaped plaza with Ionic columns, the Forum, which is overlooked from a height in the West by a temple of the Greek god Zeus, which is among several indications of an earlier Greek settlement at the site.
Notwithstanding that, the ruins are of a predominantly RomCoan city with a colonnaded main thoroughfare, the Cardo Maximus, intersected by narrower colonnaded thoroughfares, and roughly 800-metres long. The columns lining the Cardo, however, are Corinthian ones, more elaborate than the Ionic ones they replaced when the thoroughfare was widened in the second century AD.
As one walks through it towards the northern gate, one runs into the Tetrapylon (Greek for four gates) its first intersection with a cross street. One also gets to the Marcellum or Agora, an open public space that served as a grocery market, and the Nymphaeum. Built in 191 AD, and traditionally meant to be habitations of the local nymphs, it seems to have served as a sanctuary, water reservoir and assembly rooms and a place for celebrating marriages.
To the north-west of the height on which the temple of Zeus stands is the imposing South Theatre, which could once accommodate 5,000 persons. Then there is the temple of Artemis who, according to Greek mythology, was a daughter of Zeus and the protecting divinity of Jerash. Widely venerated, she was the virgin goddess of the hunt, wilderness, animals, young girls, childbirth, and plague. In later times, Artemis became associated with bows and arrows. She is often depicted as a young woman dressed in a short knee-length chiton and equipped with a hunting bow and a quiver of arrows.
Artemis’ twin brother was Apollo, god of music, arts, knowledge, healing, plague, prophecy, poetry, manly beauty, and archery, who is often accompanied by the Muses. Also identified as the sun god and an equal of Roman Sol and Greek Helos, he is shown as young, beardless, handsome and athletic who, in Greek mythology, could be cruel and destructive, and his love affairs are rarely happy.
Then there is the North Theatre. Built about AD 165 and enlarged in 235, the beautiful little North Theatre was most likely used for Government meetings rather than artistic
performances. Destroyed by earthquakes and partially dismantled to accommodate construction projects of Byzantine emperors and Umayyad Khalifs, it has been extremely well-restored in recent years.
Other structures include the churches of St Theodorus, of St John and St George, St Cosmos and St Damien, all built in the Byzantine period.
The ruins inspire awe. The most important part of the visit, however, is that it transports one into a zone in which two periods of time blend. An inescapable awareness of the present blending with a vaguely present past with its sights and sounds. One wonders what it was for those who lived, loved and died then, and the seamless flow of days, nights and years that brings there times into ours. And the words of TS Eliot steal gently into the mind:
“Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable./ What might have been is an abstraction/ Remaining a perpetual possibility/ Only in a world of speculation. /What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present.”
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)