Qasr Abd
Hyrcanus… seated himself beyond Jordan, and …erected a strong castle, and built it entirely of white stone to the very roof, and had animals of a prodigious magnitude engraved upon it. He also drew round it a great and deep canal of water. He also made caves of many furlongs in length, by hollowing a rock that was over against him; and then he made large rooms in it, some for feasting, and some for sleeping and living in. He introduced also a vast quantity of waters which ran along it, and which were very delightful and ornamental in the court. But still he made the entrances at the mouth of the caves so narrow, that no more than one person could enter by them at once…Moreover, he built courts of greater magnitude than ordinary, which he adorned with vastly large gardens.
Situated in a valley, Wadi Seer, no more than half an hour from Amman to the west, little is known for definite about the history of Qasr al-Abd. It is widely believed to have been built by a Tobiad notable, Hyrcanus of Jerusalem, (head of the powerful Tobiad family and governor of Ammon) around 200BC.
The name Qasr al Abd can be translated as Castle of the Slave or Servant, a title which may refer to Hyrcanus himself, who, as governor, was a “slave of the people”.
According to Josephus (37 – c. 100, also called Joseph ben Matityahu, a first-century Romano-Jewish scholar, historian and hagiographer) Hyrcanus left Jerusalem after losing a power struggle, and established his residence east of the Jordan, apparently on the ancestral lands of the Tobiad dynasty. The area was then a border zone between Judea and Arabia, and Josephus mentions that Hyrcanus was in constant skirmishes with Arabians, killing and capturing many. He took his own life in 175 BC, following the ascent to power in Syria of the strongly anti-Jewish Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes, fearing the latter’s revenge for his fights with the Arabians.
This heavily decorated, two-storey, stone palace (measuring about 40 m by 20 m, and 13 m high) is a rare example of Hellenistic architecture in Jordan. In the 1st century AD, Flavius Josephus described it as, “A strong fortress, which was constructed entirely of white marble up to the very roof and had beasts of gigantic size carved on it; and he enclosed it with a wide and deep moat”.
Archaeologists have established that Qasr al-Abd once stood in a much larger estate which was originally surrounded by a wall and included a park with trees and shrubs (a large stone olive press has been found on the site, suggesting the estate was partially self-sufficient in agricultural produce). Much of the estate now stands beneath the village of Iraq al-Amir.
The entrance to the building is a small courtyard fronted by two columns. Two additional columns, engaged on either side, complete the entrance facade. A mirror-image facade on the south side was added for reasons of symmetry, but did not serve as an entrance.
The palace was built from some of the biggest blocks of any ancient structure in the Middle East – the largest is 7m by 3m.
The corners of the upper facade are decorated with relief carvings of lionesses suckling their cubs.
At the base of each long wall is a fountain, carved in the shape of a leopard with raised paw. The mottling of the stone seems to mimic the leopard’s spotted coat, although this may be a result of repair.
It is known that the structure was originally surrounded by a large excavated reflecting pool, leading the first-century AD Jewish historian Flavius Josephus to suppose that this was a moat and the building a fortress. However, more recent evidence for the building’s original function being as a country pleasure palace has been presented by the contemporary Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer. It has also been suggested that the site was in fact intended to serve as a mausoleum of the Tobias family, although it was never completed.
The villa was unfinished at the time of his death indicated by several incomplete carvings and columns on site.
The inside is, as expected, a ruin. A jumble of stones, steps, passages and rooms. I would have no idea how to make sense of this chaos other than to say it was probably a combination of natural and human forces at work.
Defensive stone work for the archers or........?
I have my doubts.
I have my doubts.
A theme running through a large number of my reports is the way in ancient times columns and stones were joined together for stability and strength. It may come as no surprise that yet again there is evidence of it in the form of the recesses cut out to hold the wood or metal inserts.
A couple of mates of mine hanging around.
After Hyrcanus' death, the palace fell into ruin, succumbing easily to the earthquake of 363AD.
Its stones, though as large as 21 feet by 9 feet, were not more than 16 inches thick, and the whole structure must have collapsed quite quickly amid the tremors.
A local legend arose offering a different explanation of the reason it was built.
They say the palace was erected by a love-smitten slave who wanted to win the hand of his master’s daughter in marriage. The master agreed on condition that the slave build her a palace beyond compare. The slave set to work, toiling with stone to fashion animals and columns. Yet when the master saw that the slave was in reach of fulfilling the command, he slew him and destroyed the structure, for he would not have his daughter wed to a lowly slave.
It is only really due to the efforts of a French archaeologist who spent three years making detailed drawings of the fallen stones and a further seven years on the reconstruction that we can see it today.
About 500 m from the Palace there is a group of caves cut from the rock.
These are known as ‘Iraq al-Amir’. The caves, eleven in total, are arranged in two tiers and are thought to be man-made.
They were once used as cavalry stables, while the villagers today use them to house their goats and store chaff. At the front of one of the caves the word “Tobiad” is engraved in Aramaic. This gives credence to the theory that Qasr al-Abd was built by the Tobiad family.
That's all for now.