Byzantine mosaic workshops of north-west Jordan

Abstract

While the mosaics of Jordan were last published twenty years ago, a great number of new discoveries have been made since, predominantly in the north-west of the modern country. This region corresponds in part to the late Roman provinces of Arabia and Palaestina Secunda, and is known from modern research as a “virtual island”. The mosaics of north-west Jordan are synthesised here, numbering 94 pavements, of which 48 pavements across 30 sites are new discoveries. The current collection of northern Jordanian mosaics may be dated to a tight window of approximately 160 years in the late Byzantine/early Umayyad period (6th-8th centuries A.D.), with the great majority occupying a religious (Christian) context.

An examination of the figural and non-geometric motifs has suggested that the religious community here had aniconic inclinations and a more spiritual focus, in contrast to the preferences for a Classical repertoire found in Madaba, the renowned “city of mosaics”, towards the south.

Hierarchical coding of geometric motifs and the statistical method of Correspondence Analysis has revealed two major mosaic workshops based in Jerash, and a pattern of itinerancy amongst mosaicists who undertook commissions across the broader North-west Jordan region. It has been possible to trace their movements across the region with the assistance of dated mosaic inscriptions.

Analyses lead to the conclusion that mosaicists travelled the region independently, coming together for specific projects and then disbanding to find further work wherever it was available. Their movements were not confined to a single province or subject to the control of church leaders.

The use of motif coding in conjunction with statistical analysis is a viable method of historical inquiry, and it is recommended that the method be extended to other corpora of mosaics, beginning with the remainder of the Jordanian corpus (Madaba and other mosaics to the south), progressing to the Levant, and ultimately encompassing the entire Roman world.