City Walls of Gerasa

Muri Gerasae

WallArabia Petraea · Jerash, JordanBuilt 76 CE

About

An inscription on the northwest gate recorded these walls complete in 75/76 CE, a circuit of about 3.5 kilometres looping around both banks of the Chrysorhoas. Roughly 120 towers studded the line, and the masons ran it straight across abandoned quarries and rock-cut tombs. In 117 CE the circuit already fixed limits Gerasa never outgrew. Later emperors thickened and patched it, but the Flavian trace held.

What happened here

A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.

In ancient writing

Josephus, Jewish War 4.9.1
Records a Roman force under Lucius Annius storming Gerasa in 68 CE, shortly before the walls were finished.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 5.74
Lists Gerasa among the cities of the Decapolis.