On the floor of a modest Orthodox church in Madaba lies one of the most astonishing treasures in the Middle East: a huge 6th-century mosaic map of the Holy Land, stretching from Lebanon to the Nile Delta. It shows mountains, rivers and cities, and even a detailed plan of Jerusalem with its walls, its gates and its main street. It is the oldest surviving map of the region, a gem of Byzantine cartography that pilgrims and scholars from all over the world come to see, bending over the floor of St George's Church. And that's just the beginning: the whole of Madaba is 'the city of mosaics'.
This quiet town on the Jordanian plateau, half an hour from Amman and a stone's throw from the airport, was a major Christian centre in Byzantine times. Its churches and houses were decorated with splendid mosaic floors showing hunting scenes, mythology, nature and everyday life. Many of them survive in place and can be seen in the Archaeological Park, the Church of the Apostles and other buildings. Madaba has also kept alive a mosaic-making craft tradition, and its large Christian community gives it a special character within Jordan.
This guide helps you make the most of your visit. It covers which mosaics to see (starting with the St George's map), what each one costs and how to explore the old town on foot. It also shows how to use Madaba as a convenient base for Mount Nebo, the Dead Sea, the Bethany baptism site and the start of the King's Highway heading south. It's a must for anyone who loves history, ancient art and places with soul, and one of the most practical and pleasant bases for a trip through Jordan.
Madaba is an ancient city. It already appears in the Bible under the name Medeba, as one of the cities of the kingdom of Moab, and it is mentioned on the famous Mesha Stele (9th century BC). It passed through Moabite, Nabataean and Roman hands, but its heyday came in the Byzantine period (5th-7th centuries AD), when it became a prosperous Christian city and the seat of a bishop. Its churches were covered with the magnificent mosaic floors that made it famous. The best known is the mosaic map of the Holy Land in St George's Church, from the mid-6th century. After the Islamic conquests and a series of earthquakes, Madaba was left abandoned for centuries. In the 1880s it was resettled by Arab Christian families who came from Karak. While building their houses and churches, they rediscovered the buried Byzantine mosaics, which gave rise to the town's modern fame as the 'city of mosaics'. That whole long story, from Moab to the Byzantines and from abandonment to revival, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great Rift depression: the lowest point on Earth at the Dead Sea, the mosaic city of Madaba, Moses' Mount Nebo and the canyons that run down to the valley.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Madaba's history reaches back into the most distant past. Under the name Medeba, the city already appears in the Hebrew Bible as one of the towns on the plateau east of the Jordan, in lands fought over by Israelites, Moabites and Ammonites. The Book of Numbers and the Book of Joshua mention it when the territory is divided among the tribes of Israel, and other passages place it at the heart of the kingdom of Moab, the Semitic people who ruled this region.
The oldest and most direct record of Medeba isn't in the Bible but on a stone: the famous Mesha Stele, or Moabite Stone, from the 9th century BC, found in nearby Dhiban. In its long inscription, the Moabite king Mesha boasts of taking Medeba and other cities back from the kingdom of Israel and of building works there for his god Chemosh. It is one of the most important inscriptions of the ancient Near East, and it shows that almost three thousand years ago Madaba was already an important city in the wars between the region's kingdoms.
After the Moabite period, Medeba changed hands several times. It came under the influence of the Nabataeans, the same people who built Petra, and later, as Rome expanded eastwards, it was drawn into the Empire. It was a provincial city, with its street plan, its paved roads and its temples, at a crossroads of routes linking Arabia with Syria and the Mediterranean. But its finest hour was still to come.
Madaba's great moment came in the Byzantine period, between the 5th and 7th centuries AD, when the city became a thriving Christian centre and the seat of a bishop. Christianity had spread across the whole region, and Madaba flourished, set in lands steeped in biblical memory and close to pilgrimage sites such as Mount Nebo. Churches, mansions and public buildings went up, and the whole city filled with something that would make it famous forever: mosaic floors.
Madaba's workshops reached a very high artistic level. Using millions of coloured stone tesserae, their craftsmen covered the floors of churches and houses with dazzling compositions: hunting and herding scenes, personifications of the seasons and of cities, animals, birds, fish, flowers, geometric patterns and episodes from Greek mythology, alongside Christian themes. Madaba's Byzantine mosaic art blended the classical Greco-Roman heritage and the new faith with ease.
That golden age produced the city's crown jewel: the mosaic map of the Holy Land, made around the middle of the 6th century on the floor of a church (on whose remains today's St George's Church stands). It is the oldest surviving map of the region, with mountains, rivers, the Dead Sea crossed by boats, dozens of cities labelled in Greek and a detailed plan of Jerusalem. Alongside it, masterpieces such as the Hall of Hippolytus and the sea mosaic in the Church of the Apostles bear witness to the splendour of Byzantine Madaba.
The prosperity of Byzantine Madaba didn't last forever. In the 7th century, the region passed to the young Islamic state after the Arab conquests. Under early Islamic rule, in the Umayyad period, the city still kept some life, and some mosaics were still being made and used. But a mix of factors gradually dimmed its shine: shifting trade routes and, above all, a series of devastating earthquakes that shook the region (the most famous being the great earthquake of 749) badly damaged cities and buildings across the area.
Over time, Madaba emptied out. Its churches and houses fell into ruin, its mosaics were buried under rubble and earth, and the site became a heap of ruins on the plateau, inhabited only sporadically at most. For centuries, practically the whole long stretch from the early Middle Ages to the 19th century, the old city of mosaics lay silent and forgotten, its artistic treasure hidden underground.
Paradoxically, this long abandonment helped preserve the mosaics: buried and protected, many survived far better than if the city had stayed inhabited and been rebuilt over them again and again. Fate kept Madaba's Byzantine floors waiting until, much later, someone would build houses on those ruins once more and bring them back to light.
Modern Madaba was born in the 1880s. In those years, a group of Arab Christian families from the town of Karak, further south, decided after conflicts with other communities to move and resettle in the ruins of ancient Madaba, then uninhabited, under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. With the authorities' permission, they settled on the mound of the old city and began building their houses and churches.
And then the 'miracle' happened: as they dug foundations and cleared the ground, the new settlers kept uncovering, beneath their feet, the magnificent Byzantine mosaic floors that had lain buried for more than a thousand years. Church after church, house after house, floors appeared with maps, scenes and figures of astonishing beauty. The most celebrated find came in 1884: the great mosaic map of the Holy Land, discovered while building the new St George's Church on the remains of a Byzantine one. News of that ancient map, with its plan of Jerusalem, spread through the academic and religious world.
From then on, Madaba became a centre for the study of Byzantine art and a magnet for archaeologists, historians and pilgrims. The mosaics were excavated and protected, an archaeological park was created and, later, a school to train craftspeople able to restore the ancient pieces and make new ones, keeping the age-old tradition alive. Those families from Karak didn't just repopulate a dead city: they gave it back to history and gave it its modern identity as 'the city of mosaics'.
Today's Madaba is a calm, prosperous town on the Jordanian plateau, proud of being both an archaeological treasure and a living community. It has one of the largest Christian populations in Jordan, a legacy of the families who resettled it in the 19th century, and in its streets Orthodox and Catholic churches stand alongside mosques, in a climate of tolerance that is part of the town's character. It's a place where the Byzantine past and the present intertwine at every step.
Mosaic is still its defining feature. Besides the spectacular ancient floors you can visit (the map at St George's, the Hall of Hippolytus in the Archaeological Park, the sea mosaic in the Church of the Apostles), Madaba keeps a living craft tradition: workshops and an art school where mosaic technique is taught, historic pieces are restored and new works are made and sold in the shops in the centre. The town's souvenir par excellence is, of course, a handmade mosaic.
For travellers, Madaba is as rewarding for its art as it is practical for its location. A few minutes from the airport and in the middle of the country, it's a convenient base, calmer and cheaper than Amman, for exploring Mount Nebo (where Moses saw the Promised Land), the Dead Sea, the baptism site at Bethany and the start of the King's Highway towards Petra. Walking through its old town, crouching to look at a map made fifteen centuries ago from millions of tesserae and watching a craftsman set little coloured stones one by one lets you feel, in a single afternoon, the continuity of a three-thousand-year-old story.
