There are Roman ruins all around the Mediterranean, but few as complete, as extensive and as well preserved as those of Jerash. Here there isn't just a lone column or an isolated theatre: there's an entire city, with its great plaza, its main paved avenue lined with hundreds of columns, its temples, its theatres, its fountains and its baths, all standing or reconstructed, so you can walk along the same streets the people of Gerasa walked almost two thousand years ago. It is perhaps the place where you can best understand what life was like in a provincial city of the Roman Empire.
Jerash —ancient Gerasa— was one of the ten cities of the Decapolis, the league of Greco-Roman cities that flourished in this region thanks to trade. Its golden age, between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, left the monuments that amaze visitors today: Hadrian's Arch, the Oval Plaza surrounded by columns (a shape unique in the Roman world), the long Cardo Maximus with chariot ruts still marked in the stone, the Temple of Artemis and the theatres where concerts are still held. An earthquake and the centuries buried it, and so it was preserved almost intact until it was rediscovered in the 19th century.
This guide takes you through the best of Jerash: where to enter, what not to miss, how to avoid the heat and the crowds, how much admission costs and how to combine the visit with Ajloun Castle for a full day in Jordan's green north. Whether it's your first Roman city or you've already seen the Forum or Pompeii, Jerash surprises with its scale and its state of preservation: walking along its colonnaded avenue at sunset, with the sun turning the stone golden, is one of the great moments of a trip to Jordan.
Jerash, ancient Gerasa, was settled from very early times, but it was with the arrival of the Greek world, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, that it became an important Hellenistic city. Under Roman rule, from 63 BC, it became part of the Decapolis, the league of ten Greco-Roman cities in the region, and enjoyed its great heyday between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD: it grew rich on the caravan trade and filled up with temples, theatres, plazas and a great colonnaded avenue. Emperor Hadrian visited it in 129-130, and the great arch that still welcomes visitors was built in his honour. With the crisis of the Empire, the earthquake of 749 and the shift in trade routes, Gerasa declined and lay covered by sand for centuries, which paradoxically helped preserve it. It was rediscovered by European travellers in the early 19th century and has been excavated ever since. Today it is one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the world. Its full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: the capital built on seven hills, and the fertile north of the great Roman Decapolis cities, Jerash and Umm Qais.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Walking today along Jerash's colonnaded avenue, it's hard to imagine that beneath all that Roman grandeur lies a much older story. The fertile, well-watered hills of this part of northern Jordan were settled from very early times, and remains of settlements going back to the Neolithic and the Bronze Age have been found here. But the city that grew into monumental Jerash was born with the arrival of the Greek world.
After Alexander the Great's conquests in the 4th century BC, the whole region came under the influence of Hellenistic culture. That culture was spread by the kingdoms that divided Alexander's empire between them: the Ptolemies ruling from Egypt and the Seleucids from Syria. In this setting a Greek city was founded, or reorganised, and given the name Gerasa (Antioch on the Chrysorrhoas, 'the golden river', after the stream that runs through it). Tradition even credited its founding to veterans of Alexander's army. Whether or not that myth is true, it shows how proud the city was of its Greek identity.
Gerasa did well from its position on the trade routes linking the Arabian Peninsula and the Mediterranean with inland Syria. The trade in spices, incense and other goods arriving from Arabia, much of it through the Nabataeans of Petra, made the city prosperous. By the 1st century BC Gerasa was already a well-established Hellenistic city with Greek institutions, and it was about to come under an even greater power, one that would take it to its peak: Rome.
In 63 BC the Roman general Pompey conquered Syria and the surrounding region, and Gerasa became part of the Roman world. Soon afterwards it joined the Decapolis, a league of ten cities with a Greek culture. They included Philadelphia (today's Amman), Gadara (Umm Qais) and Scythopolis (Beit She'an), and they had a special status and some autonomy within the Empire. Membership of the Decapolis connected Gerasa to a network of sister cities and boosted both its prestige and its trade.
The 1st and 2nd centuries AD were Gerasa's golden age. Caravan trade and farming on its fertile land made the city very rich, and that money paid for an ambitious building programme that gave Gerasa the look we admire today. The great Cardo Maximus was laid out, a main avenue lined with columns. The Temple of Zeus went up, along with the majestic Temple of Artemis, dedicated to the city's patron goddess. The city also built two theatres, baths, a monumental nymphaeum, the unusual Oval Plaza (a shape almost unique in Roman town planning) and a wall around the whole city.
The high point came with a visit from the emperor Hadrian, who spent the winter of 129-130 AD in the region. In his honour the people of Gerasa built the great triumphal arch that still welcomes visitors at the southern end of the city. The imperial visit showed how much prestige Gerasa had gained. It was a thriving provincial city that matched the great cities of the Roman East in grand buildings. At its peak its population may have been around 20,000.
As Christianity spread and the Empire converted, Gerasa became a Christian city and stayed prosperous. During the Byzantine period (5th and 6th centuries AD) the city flourished for a second time. Many churches were built, and more than a dozen have been identified. Many of them were decorated with beautiful mosaics of geometric, plant and figurative designs that survive to this day. Stone from the old pagan temples, which were no longer in use, was reused to build these Christian churches, as happened across the whole region. The city had its own bishop and was a religious centre of some importance.
In 614 a Persian invasion shook the region. A few years later, in 636, came the decisive Battle of the Yarmuk, fought not far away, and after it Muslim armies conquered the whole area. Under the new Islamic rule, especially during the Umayyad Caliphate based in Damascus, Gerasa remained inhabited and kept some of its activity. Archaeologists have even excavated an Umayyad mosque and pottery workshops from this period. In many ways the shift from the Byzantine to the Islamic world was gradual, and daily life in the city carried on without major breaks.
Even so, the decline was already on its way. When the centre of Islamic power moved from the Umayyads in Damascus to the Abbasids in Baghdad, trade routes and political weight shifted away from the region. Gerasa began to lose importance and people. For centuries the city had thrived at the crossroads between Arabia and the Mediterranean, and now, little by little, it was being left on the sidelines of history.
The final blow came in 749 AD. A devastating earthquake struck the whole Jordan Valley region and ruined much of Gerasa, bringing down columns, temples and buildings and hastening the city's abandonment. The population had already shrunk, and it had neither the strength nor the reason to rebuild the great city. Gerasa emptied out until it was little more than a tiny hamlet, or nothing at all. By the time of the Crusades in the 12th century, the city was so ruined that it played almost no part. One chronicle says it was briefly fortified and then destroyed.
For nearly a thousand years the ruins of Gerasa lay forgotten, slowly buried under sand and soil carried by wind and rain. Oddly enough, that neglect and that blanket of sand saved it. Because the city was never resettled or used as a large-scale quarry, it survived underground far better than other ancient cities that stayed inhabited and were taken apart stone by stone. Under the ground the columns, paving and mosaics lay intact, waiting to be rediscovered.
That rediscovery came in the early 19th century. In 1806 the German traveller Ulrich Jasper Seetzen was one of the first Europeans to identify the ruins of Gerasa and report them in the West. Over the following decades other explorers confirmed how important the find was. Systematic excavations began in the 20th century, and since then they have uncovered, and partly rebuilt, the city we visit today. In the late 19th century Circassian settlers made their home in the area, and their settlement grew into modern Jerash, which sits right next to the ruins.
Today Jerash is one of Jordan's great treasures and one of the best-preserved examples of Roman provincial architecture anywhere in the world. More than a century of excavation and restoration has brought back into view the Oval Plaza, the Cardo with its nymphaeum, the temples of Zeus and Artemis, the two theatres, the hippodrome and the Byzantine churches, so visitors can walk through an almost complete ancient city. The site has been on UNESCO's Tentative List for World Heritage status for years, and it's a must on any trip around the country.
Every summer, usually in July, the ruins go back to their original role as a stage for a few days during the Jerash Festival of Culture and Arts, one of the most important cultural events in Jordan and the Arab world. Founded in 1981 under the patronage of Queen Noor, the festival fills the ancient theatres and squares with concerts of Arab and international music, dance, poetry, theatre and crafts. Watching a show in the South Theatre, with the floodlit columns behind the stage, is an unforgettable experience. It links the present with the performances held there almost two thousand years ago.
As you walk around, you'll often come across uniformed bagpipers and drummers playing in the theatres. They're a curious legacy of British military traditions in 20th-century Jordan, and their music sounds spectacular in the perfect acoustics of the Roman seating. With the golden stone, the endless columns and that unexpected music, Jerash offers one of the most complete journeys back in time you can take in the Middle East. It's the story of a city that prospered under Rome, prayed under Byzantium, slept under the sand for a thousand years and came back to life to amaze today's travellers.
