Overview

Bibliography

Umm el-Jimal is a very large rural agrarian settlement located along a volcanic basalt flow from Jebel al-Druze in the Hauran of northern Jordan. The basalt flow provided the inhabitants with the stone that characterizes the settlements many buildings. The large settlement extends almost a kilometer north to south, and half a kilometer east to west. It consists of 150 buildings, which have survived standing one to three stories tall. Most of the buildings are large courtyard style houses, but there is also 15 churches, a praetorium, Late Roman castellum, a Byzantine barrack, multiple gates and numerous reservoirs and cisterns.

Although the site received many early modern visitors, Howard Butler of the Princeton University Expedition to Southern Syria made the first systematic study of the site in 1905 and 1909. He identified the public buildings and churches and studied 20 of the houses. Numerous inscriptions have been found at the site, many of which were catalogued by Enno Littmann in a series of publications in 1913. Recent excavation and study of the site has been done by the Umm el-Jimal Project under the direction of Bert de Vries of Calvin College. They engaged in 8 field seasons over a twenty-two year period between 1972 and 1995. Some of their results include the identification of a Late Roman castellum on the eastern side of the town, and an earlier ruined town (from the first through the third centuries CE) to the southeast. It appears that the first settlement in the area began in the ruined town to the southeast, which the excavators have called al-Herri. The praetorium, the castellum, and a few other structures were then built in the area of Umm el-Jimal. After the castellum was destroyed, the barrack was built in the early Byzantine period. The town expanded around these structures and prospered throughout the Byzantine and the Umayyad periods. The settlement came to an end in the mid-eighth century due to plague and earthquake.