How Jordan's Umm al-Jimal became a UNESCO World Heritage Site of ancient empires

In 1818, part way along his journey in the Hauran – a region now located in Northern Jordan – William John Bankes made a discovery. It is hard to imagine the vision Bankes must have come across.

Located at the edge of the Badiya, an arid desert region, the area may first have appeared to Bankes as completely uninhabitable, before the unmistakeable jagged edges of what could only be buildings, cast out of black basalt, came into focus.

Getting closer, Bankes would have seen buildings of all different sizes separated by narrow roads into discreet neighbourhoods.

Stepping into the town, he could have counted more than 150 private dwellings and almost 20 places of worship.

Had he entered some of the larger buildings he might have wondered at the remnants of old mosaics and fractured altars.

This was the ancient town of Umm al-Jimal.

Bankes’ experience in Umm al-Jimal is one of the high points in the catalogue of a man obsessed with the wider Arabian region. He had set off on this excursion six years after giving up his post as the Member of Parliament for Truro in England’s South West, and four years after serving as an aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington.

Despite his slightly unreliable character, his close friend Lord Byron once described him as the ‘father of all mischief’, Bankes was a committed Egyptologist. He seemed to demonstrate a deep passion for archaeology and a fascination with inscription.

Now, his contributions to the field of study are acknowledged, but he died in exile with even the discovery of Umm al-Jimal often ascribed to one of his fellow travellers.

The town shaped by empires

As research into Umm al-Jimal continued through subsequent expeditions, each one digging a little deeper and surveying a little more accurately, a narrative started to coalesce.

The town could be viewed as a landscape on which the clashes of empires had played out. Even the name, Umm al-Jimal, translating to the mother of camels in Arabic, hinted at fortunes that rose and fell like the curve of a Dromedary’s back.

It was the Nabateans, an ancient Arab people, who had first settled the site into a permanent home in the first century CE outside their capital city Bostra.

This is borne out in the discoveries, with Nabatean inscriptions found on tombstones and altars across the town, including some joint Nabatean and Greek writings.

With the second century came change. An occupying Roman force entered Umm al-Jimal, as part of a wider incursion which included the capture of Bostra.

Immediately the new force made their presence felt, building and rebuilding throughout the town. Many of these first Roman structures were to be destroyed in a widespread uprising against Roman rule, with only three notable survivals.

These included the Commodus gate, which formed the main entrance, a reservoir, and the Praetorium, a multi-purpose town-hall style building which is thought to have contained offices and a courtroom.

After destruction, Roman efforts to re-establish control were successful for the next 75 years. Yet by the fifth century, the identity of the townsfolk, and therefore the town itself, was starting to shift again.

This was a boom period as the population spiked and the widespread conversion to Christianity as part of Byzantine rule prompted the remodelling of existing structures.

Churches sprung up, many built with stones that had once been used in fortifications, turning war into worship. Frescoes and mosaics proliferated as indicators of prosperity brought by trade.

The second peak came after the fall of the Byzantines, under consecutive Islamic dynasties. Their presence was first established with the rise of Umayyad power in the region in the seventh century.

The Umayyads and then the Abbasids guided the town through drought, famine and a major earthquake, rebuilding as needed. They also re-modelled, with one church possibly converted into a mosque – its whole alignment shifted to point to Mecca.

After the Abbasids, there was no great empire to follow. The story continues to tell of the town gradually emptying in later years, to lie abandoned beyond Bankes’ discovery and on until Druze populations arrived from Syria.

UNESCO recognition sparks discussions on reconsideration

The facts in each of these narratives are accurate, yet thematically they are incomplete.

Now that Umm al-Jimal has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, the sixth Jordanian property, there is cause for reconsideration.

The first flawed story is that Umm al-Jimal could be ‘rediscovered’. While the resident population narrowed to zero, as they did across the wider region, the site continued to host nomadic populations (and a longer Mamluk occupation) throughout the centuries.

The strategic location with its water sources and volcanically enriched soil that rendered it a refuge for the Druze in the 1930s, also made it a welcome winter stop-off for passing groups.

The massively successful archaeological and conservatory missions active in the town since the 1970s have succeeded by parking Western tropes of ‘rediscovery’ and instead by working closely with the local population on joint efforts.

The second is that which forces a historical lens of ‘rise and fall’ sustained by constant conflict — this doubly hampers our understanding and enjoyment of the site.

More accurate would be a perspective of growth and contraction, aligned with varying degrees of coexistence. The withdrawal of the Romans, for example, need not be identified with a decline, inherently comparing the ‘value’ of different civilisations.

Instead, we should investigate what it meant for the residents of Umm al-Jimal for the town and its interpretations belong to them.

As the long-term director of the site, Bert de Vries said: "Umm el-Jimal has in abundance what appear less obvious at famous sites like Petra… the houses of ordinary people… When you visit Umm el-Jimal, you experience how the ancients lived, farmed, traded, worshipped, and raised families."

Perhaps the beauty and enduring value of Umm el-Jimal is in its consistency and resilience, in the way each group that moved through the town left a record but found themselves sculpted by the same black basalt as the group before.

The Jordanian Director General of Antiquities, Dr Fadi Bala’awi summarised that the site was a record of "the strength and tenacity of local culture in the face of powerful outside influences," a lasting "theme with universal reverberations."

The museum on site embodies this, with exhibitions up to the present day, and hosts workshops with skilled local artisans.

If that isn’t worthy of UNESCO World Heritage status, what is?

Cover image: © UJAP

Will Spiers is a policy researcher and writer based in London. Will read history as an undergraduate, then completed a Masters in Political Science at the American University of Beirut