Finishing the Circle

For the dedicated digger, nothing beats the thrill of the exposure of finds within these fills. On bonanza days, it’s been upturned ceramic beakers covering piles of crystal beads, the next 3rd Millennium BCE Onager (a wild Asian Ass) skeletons, or a cluster of bronze sickle blades nestling in the depression left by a perished leather or fabric bag. 

After the dutiful tedium of recording a find, the thrill of discovery subsides, and the earnest questions begin. What is this? What is its function and most importantly how does it fit into the broader biography of the archaeology from whence it came? More often than not the answers to these questions remain opaque.

Sometimes, say with coins, clay Cuneiform tablets, or inscriptions, after time and labour a good start might be made on a find’s meaning, at least as definitive an answer as archaeology can provide. 

From discovery through interpretation to final conclusion and publication. Finishing the circle. History is made.

The first time I felt the magic of this was as a young volunteer for the Museum of London at a site the antithesis of the Mesopotamian mud brick sites I would later excavate. Hard by the Thames, sodden, muddy, cold, rainy, unpaid. This environment had advantages. We exposed Medieval leather shoes with the straw toe stuffing still in place and many other miraculously well preserved finds. One in particular stuck in my mind; A pewter cap badge. Found, washed, examined, source material consulted and there it was: material, date, patronage/ allegiance explained – the circled had been completed. I still remember how satisfying that was…

So now imagine this: In 1896, Father Kleopas Koikylides, the librarian of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy in Jerusalem visited a newly established Christian community in a small town in what is now Jordan. Placed on Emperor Trajan’s great Roman trunk road, this town Madaba was already ancient. A Moabite settlement, witness to the great waves of Old testament history, Moses had passed close by here on the final miles of his Exodus. Eventually, Madaba tumbled in CE earthquakes and was covered in the red fertile soils of Jordan plateaux.

In the mid 1880s, just over decade before Father Koikylides visited, Madaba and its ancient ruins had been resettled by Christians driven from their nearby homes by sectarian tensions. Ottoman governors granted permission to resettle and build new churches, but only where others had previously stood. 

Thus, in 1884, whilst clearing the foundations of a Byzantine church ruin for today’s church of St George, something miraculous was exposed and reported to the Patriarch in Jerusalem. The lost church had a mosaic map floor depicting the Holy Land, with an oversized vignette of Jerusalem at its core.

This was what Father Koikylides had come to view. A map of a lost world, and of a city, his city, the city.

I wonder what Koikylides thought when he looked over this, and at the Jerusalem mosaic vignette? It was his home. He must have been able to recognise the old city walls, today’s Jaffa Gate, the streets he walked daily around the Christian quarter and the building at heart of Christianity itself - the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. 

He would have known the Jerusalem surroundings intimately too. The very route he had travelled to Madaba is depicted accurately on the mosaic map. On his journey back home, Koikylides would passed beneath Mount Nebo from where Joshua got his first glimpse of the future battlefield below, crossed the Jordan river where John baptised, near where the Roman ferry and its wooden guard tower, and onward up into the hills beyond Jericho. 

All these places are shown on the map. But that’s not all, it depicts the most significant sites and events of the Old Testament (only 4 from the New), a mosaic carpet of Mediterranean coast from Lebanon to Sinai and the Nile delta. To the east the mountains to the edge of the desert. The spatial positioning of sites on the mosaic, the inclusion of Roman milestone distances between them, this is the most accurate map of the Holy land until the British Army survey of the late 19^th C.

Did he wander the Holy City’s streets in his mind’s eye, comparing what he knew to what he saw on the mid 6^th C CE map? At his Damascus Gate, there was no visible Roman column in a semi-circular piazza, but this would explain the contemporary Muslim name for the gate – Gate of the Column. When he returned home, would this plaza be traceable still in the layout of the alleys of east Jerusalem (yes)?

He must have been curious at the depiction of 2 classical period main streets. Decumani complete with colonnades, and what looked like a huge church near the southern Zion Gate. He knew those areas of the city, but these things were no longer visible.

It would take over 80 years for the recording and study of the map to be as comprehensively completed as possible. The map dated, the area covered studied, the sites depicted identified, the few mistakes corrected, the inscriptions translated, their archival source origins traced as an imaginary Byzantine library in Madaba was created.

The key to dating the mosaic was the huge church Koikylides saw on the map but couldn’t see in Jerusalem – This church, as the map tells us, it is the New Church of the Mother of God built by Emperor Justinian. Over to Procopius….

…the church is supported on all sides by a number of huge columns from that place, which in colour resemble flames of fire, some standing below and some above and others in the stoas which surround the whole church except on the side facing the east. Two of these columns stand before the door of the church, exceptionally large and probably second to no column in the whole world. Here is added another colonnaded stoa which is called the narthex, I suppose because it is not broad. Beyond this is a court with similar columns standing on the four sides. From this there lead doors to the interior which are so stately that they proclaim to those walking outside what kind of sight they will meet within. Beyond there is a wonderful gateway and an arch, carried on two columns, which rises to a very great height.

This church was dedicated in 542 CE; therefore, the creation of map must postdate this; It must be mid 6^th C CE, we can be no more accurate than that.

Using the maps location, in recent times this church has been excavated, Justinian’s dedicatory inscription unearthed. Ditto the sanctuary of St Lot up on the eastern cliffs beyond the Dead Sea. The main classical period Cardo of Jerusalem was excavated too so one can wander it again today.

But the core of the map is in the very heart of the Christian Jerusalem and world.The church marking the spot of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Christ, the original home of the Relic of the True Cross; The Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

There are few archaeological sites with more historical resonance than this. What of the accuracy of position of the church itself? Let’s remember the detail of folk memory for momentous events can be long and accurate (Agincourt anyone?). The site lay outside the Roman period walls as a cemetery would. A continuous line of bishops in Jerusalem over 3 centuries since the crucifixion would have helped to maintain the memory. When the 2^nd CE Roman temple of Venus was demolished to look for the traditionally held location of Golgotha in 326 CE, tomb(s) were exposed.

The original church was dedicated under Emperor Constantine in 336 CE, and revamped by Justinian in the mid 6^th C. This original build, the one depicted on the map, is lost. The church we see today is predominately Crusader period and later, Constantine and Justinian’s destroyed, first by the Persians in the early 7^th C CE.

Procopius gives us a detailed description; the map becomes our ‘photo’. There were, he says, 5 parts to the church over 150m. Stairs leading from the Cardo to 3 gates opening into a court. From here we entered the basilica, exiting into a second open court - the site of Golgotha. Beyond was a domed rotunda over the tomb itself.

The map shows us this building. The columns of the cardo in white, flanking the stairs to the 3 great doors. The red tiled roof of the basilica, on its left a trapezoidal square, the parvis, where visitors still gather to enter the western side today. The golden dome over the tomb/resurrection site beyond. 

Today, just to the east of the site of this building stands the 19^th C Russian Mission in Exile. Starting in 1865 excavations were carried out here roughly once a decade. Father Koikylides would have certainly been aware of what they had exposed, but needed the map to tie up the loose ends. Behind and below the apse of the Russian Church, Roman/Byzantine period paving of the western Roman street, and what might be the uprights of a later arch on this thoroughfare were excavated. Beyond are 3 stairs of a grand entrance, surely those of a Roman monumental building, reused for Constantine’s and Justinian’s church. They are the stairs on the map.

Now, Like Father Koikylides, we can visit both the map in Jordan and the city of Jerusalem. We can and will use the map to navigate the old city, to identify what remains and still visualise what is gone. 

Without the map it would have been hard for Koikylides and us to arrange all the pieces of the puzzle to get a complete picture…. The rarest and most satisfying feeling in archaeology and finish this most magical of circles.

Jerusalem on the Madaba Map

Church of the Holy Sepulchre