SHAHBA

SHAHBA

This week-end’s major excursion was to Shahba, another town in the Hauran region which we visited last week when we went to Bosra, but this time the access road was not the new Jordan highway which runs between the Ante-Lebanon Hills and the Jebel al-Arab but the Suweida road which runs south from Damascus further to the east and to the east of the Jebel Al-Arab.  

Suweida is the principal town of the region for administrative purposes today, so the signposts all show that town.  At first the road is fairly crowded as there is no real distinction between where Damascus ends and where other smaller places begin. They all seem to merge into one another.  The largest and busiest town near Damascus is Newja where people were queueing to buy their bread, and the butchers were hosing down the pavements and nearby doors and clearing up the gruesome debris of the morning’s slaughter.  On the left as we drove through is a large mosque elaborately decorated in blue mosaics or tiles which struck us as being distinctly Shi’a in character, reminiscent of the architecture of Iran.  This impression was confirmed on the return journey when the people were coming out from midday prayers and the majority were dressed in the Shi’a fashion. The elaborate nature of the mosque in such an unlikely setting is due to the fact that this is the site of the Sitt or Lady shrine dedicated to the memory of Zeinab, the daughter of Hussein who was captured with a small number of  followers when her brother was slaughtered by the Ommayyad forces in the seventh century, an event which was to confirm the separation between the two main Islamic factions we know today, the Sunnis and the Shi’as.

Once these small towns are passed, the road becomes quieter and most of the villages encountered along the way are some way away from the road.  There is considerable military presence all the way down, with a huge aviation camp on the left with numerous rounded “bunker” hangars made of reinforced concrete with their roofs covered with earth, presumably as a camouflage measure from the air.  This perimeter fence was many kilometres long.

Like the rest of the Hauran plateau, the countryside is flat and rather monotonous and the land was not so well cultivated as the land along the Jordan highway.  There were intermittent olive groves and some vineyards, but the trees were small and bent over as a result of the prevailing westerly winds which blow mercilessly across the plain.

Shahba, which lies about 87Kms. south of Damascus, is a curious town.  Philip the Arab who was Emperor of Rome between 444-447A.D. was born here and, not unnaturally, he spent considerable sums of money and not a little effort embellishing his home town which for a while was known as Philipopolis.  If Bosra was not a “dead” Roman town, Shahba is even more alive, because the town area in use today is the same area enclosed within the walls of the Roman town, although the walls, the outline of which is visible, are no longer standing, and many of the houses and shops in use today are the same buildings which stood in Roman times, particularly in the decamanus, or east-west thoroughfare, and the cardus maximus running from north to south is the main street of modern Shahba.  Remains of the northern and southern gates are still standing. As we parked the car in the decamanus, a manure cart appeared tooting its horn and the women emerged with their offerings which were carted away.  Chickens clucked around the ancient stones and washing hung from the rooftops. The process of adaptation to modern times is evident everywhere as Roman stone walls are topped with concrete circular beams and new roofs put in place.  In one of the old shops was a man with his two teenage sons weaving cloth on hand looms.  We could not see the purpose of the cloth they were making so, as they did not have the words to explain it to us, the father took Robert into the back room where they slept to show him while I stayed outside with the dog.  The long woven pieces with geometric designs are folded into pillows!  Mystery solved.  Just below this little shop are four monumental pillars, three still intact and one broken, which once marked the entrance to a temple.  Today, however, they mark the entrance to a private house!  Some entrance!

At the top of the decamanus, which is still paved with the original Roman paving, is the
forum, a wide open rectangle around which stands a temple which Philip the Arab had built to honour his deified father Julius Marinus.  Though lacking a roof, the fabric of the walls is remarkably sound.  Of course, at Shahba, which is in the same volcanic belt as Bosra, the main building material was volcanic basalt which accounts for the high degree of preservation of the buildings.  The cone of an extinct volcano, Tell Shihan, dominates the town and the volcano sides are exploited by a scarring open-cast bitumen mine.


To the right of the temple and at the western end of the forum is another curious structure, rather like a stage, the purpose of which has been debated in the past.  However, it would now appear that this “stage” was a kind of  open air shrine where statuary of various gods and, naturally, of the Emperor’s family were displayed.  Robert, ever looking at things with the technical eye, was impressed by the building techniques used. The lintels are not simply placed over the uprights but grooves were made in the upright stones and protuberances in the lintels themselves so that the two stones were put together something like tongue and groove joints in woodwork. Next door to this shrine are the remains of a palace but, as people live there and have been adding bits on, it is not easy to see.

While we were wandering around, a little man who lives in a room in the building came out and observed our comings and goings.  Then he made his way off to the right indicating that we should follow him.  He turned out to be the key-keeper for the theatre which stands just behind the temple. After the monumental proportions of Bosra which could seat 15,000, this is like a miniature jewel seating around 2,000. It is remarkably well preserved, although some restoration has been done and we were not too keen on it because it seemed too perfect and too modern.  Meanwhile a goat was doing a high-wire act around the perimeter of the theatre walls.

As we stood taking pictures of the monumental temple pillars now guarding the entrance to a private house, another man dressed in black with a black and white keffiyeh around his head came up to us and asked if we would like to see the mosaics museum.  I am the caretaker of the museum, he said, so we followed him back down the decamanus and into the cardus maximus which is the main bazaar street with its chaos of modern traffic.  To reach the museum we had to go through the remains of the Roman baths. In fact, they are almost intact except that the barrel vaulted roofs and domes have partly fallen in.  These are curious too because the Romans made use of light volcanic tufa and concrete (which the Romans invented) to make the vaults.  The three main rooms are still clear, the caldarium or steam room, the tepidarium and the frigidarium.  We could have done with the caldarium just then! Another interesting point about these baths is the number of holes made in the stones at regular intervals all the way up the walls.  These holes are the points at which the marble slabs which once covered the walls were attached to the stone.  The baths must have been sumptuous indeed. The water was brought from the mountains ten kilometres away and an aqueduct, remains of which are still standing, brought it the last kilometre.

The mosaics museum at Shahba was itself a 24 roomed Roman villa and a number of the mosaics were found in situ when the villa was discovered in the seventies, which is why it was turned into a museum where the mosaics can be appreciated in their original position.  The most remarkable thing about these mosaics is the tiny size of the pieces which measure only half a centimetre.  A number of other mosaics not found at Shahba but at nearby Suweida are displayed there too as well as quite a few terracotta jars and jugs uncovered on the site. There is also a statue of Philip the Arab wearing a crown of laurel leaves which has been partly restored.

Philip the Arab was the last of the Roman Emperors to hail from Syria.  When we think of the spreading and sprawling Roman Empire, somehow or another I suppose we tend to think of the influence Rome exerted on the various territories of its Empire and ignore the traffic coming in the opposite direction.  Syria had considerable influence in Rome due to the marriage of generals with daughters of that land, one of whom was the mother of a famous Emperor, Caracalla, and later with Syrian-born citizens becoming emperors themselves.  One of the Syrian contributions to Rome which was to change the face of the entire world was the transmission of Christianity.  Although Christianity was hatched in Jerusalem and the area of Palestine, it was not until it passed through the Damascus sieve with Paul, the ultimate marketing man, turning it into a viable “commercial” package that it began to spread, and the first organized centre of Christianity was at Antioch then a part of Syria.  Roman Emperors such as Philip the Arab were not Christians themselves but they did support the product emanating from their native land, giving it the push necessary to become established in Rome from where it went on to conquer the world.


The caretaker of the museum was quite knowledgeable about the items in his care and told us the story of Orpheus and Ariadne and Bacchus and the other figures depicted in the mosaics.  Then, when we had finished our tour, he offered us a cup of tea in his office.  This, in itself, was an interesting experience.  The main conversation piece while we waited for his son to bring the tea was the stove standing on an engraved  brass platform in the middle of the room with its ancient seats and worn table.  Why? you may ask.  The interesting thing about this typical cylindrical wood-burner type stove was that it had a pipe attached to it with a small container at the top which fed diesel into the base of the stove.  The container had a gauge which indicated the level of diesel still available. Not a drop escaped and there was no smell at all.  The room was warm as toast and we were grateful for that because it was very cold outside. We were given a gift of a postcard of a mosaic depicting the son of the president who was killed in a traffic accident which had been made by the curator of the museum.  As he presented his gift, his smile revealed his gold-capped teeth.

Outside again we gave in to temptation and stopped at a shop selling cakes and biscuits.  These are to be found everywhere and it is difficult to pass them by because the cakes, mostly sweet filo pastry filled with pistachios and cream and bathed in honey, are piled up in appetizing pyramids on vast platters.  It is fatal to stop in any spot because immediately a crowd gathers anxious to know where everyone is from, and whether you like Syria and what are the best and the worst things about the country.  In our case, Simon the dog acts like a magnet and soon I was surrounded by about twenty people all wanting to look at his eyes and know what his name was, all completely mesmerized by this hairy animal which sits down when he is told and does not conform to the general expectation of a fierce dog.  One young man asked if he was for sale and when I replied that you do not sell your friends, he said “I like that answer.  A very nice answer.”  It later turned out that he was the owner of a shop two doors up where we stopped to buy some pistachios and other things.  When Robert went in, he asked if he was with a group.  Robert replied that he was only with his wife and his dog and then the young man said “Oh dear!  I think I may have said the wrong thing because I asked if your dog was for sale and maybe your wife took it as an insult”.  Robert reassured him in that regard and we went back to find the car.

The question inevitably arises of how it is that a once abandoned Roman town now pulsates with life.  The answer is that Shahba was repopulated in the last century when Druze people, fleeing from difficult times in Lebanon, settled in the town and made it their home.  Most of the people in Shahba today are Druze, although the museum caretaker told us that there were also some “Christmas” but not many.  This is evident in the dress of the people who still wear traditional clothing.  The women wear voluminous long black dresses, frequently made of lacy material, and on their heads they wear white muslin headcloths framing the face completely.  They do not cover their faces and many women wear a kind of fez type cap, but not so high as the Moroccan fez, below their veils. As it was a cold day, many women also wore white hand-knitted woollen   shawls around their shoulders.  The men wear traditional Arab trousers, wide black pants which are tight around the leg from the knee downwards, with a short black felt jacket.  Over the jacket many men were wearing a long black cape-like garment with long sleeve-like pockets similar to the “wings” on graduation gowns.

The Druze are one of the branches of Shi’a Islam found in Syria today.  Although the Hauran is a Druze stronghold, the Druze are a minority within a minority.  Shi’a Moslems account for only about 10% of Moslems worldwide and the Druze are only a small minority within the Shi’a commununity.  They are often regarded by Sunni Moslems as heretical.  The Druze originated in Egypt in the 11th century and then spread mostly to the southern mountains in the Lebanon where they formed a close-knit community.  Druze philosophy is not very well known by outsiders even today but it would seem to incorporate anicient philosophies as well as the teachings of the Bible and the Qur’an.  They believe in redemption through a series of reincarnations.

The return journey was interesting from a climatic point of view.  We had been lucky enough to see Shahba during a dry interlude because it had been raining as we drove down and dark clouds were gathering as we left.  However, something quite unexpected happened.  On the horizon we could see clouds of sand and dust gathering  and then being whirled along by the relentless westerly wind which seems to eternally sweep the Hauran plateau.  A sand storm was brewing.  Suddenly we were in the middle of it. Vision was totally obscured by the brown cloud of sand particles and stones which battered the car roof and windows.  Military trucks and tanks stopped on the road as soldiers endeavoured to secure their tarpaulins.  Shepherds with their flocks headed for shelter in the lee of the nearest rocks and the donkeys turned their rumps stoically towards the source of this barrage, their ears flattened against their heads.  Little birds struggling to fly across the road and buffetted by the storm realized from centuries of conditioning that their only hope was to fly as close to the ground as possible.  They made it.  As we drove on, we left the storm behind us only to find ourselves in the middle of a cloudburst.  Life on the Hauran plateau is no easy matter.


We had wanted to find some other smaller places with things of interest, Hayan, Hit and Shaqqa, but the bad weather and poor visibility made this a waste of time, so we decided to postpone these visits until another time

March 29th 1998