Athena Review Image Archive ™
Qasr el Azraq: Satellite image of fort with plan
Qasr el Azraq: satellite image of fort with plan (Google Images 2019; Kennedy & Riley 1990 fg.127)
The fort or castellum at el Azraq, located on an oasis 80 km east of Amman. is now surrounded by a large town, as seen in the satellite image. In the early 20th century, however, when first photographed and described, the Azraq Castle lay in an unpopulated zone. The oasis is considered the most important perennial source of water in the Syrian Desert after that at Palmyra , and a major Roman road from the legionary fortress at Bosra passed through it. Milestones from the Severan period have been found near Azraq, and Severan building inscriptions from a subsidiary fort at Uweinid provide earliest known date for Roman occupation at the oasis (Kennedy and Riley 1990).
The Roman castellum at el Azraq is dated by an inscribed altar of Diocletian and Maximian (AD 287–305) and two building inscriptions (AD 326/333; 333). A few Roman potsherds from the 3rd and the early and middle 4th centuries have been found on the surface (Parker, 1986; Kennedy and Riley 1990).
The
building, 79 x 72 meters in area, in its current form is a medieval
reconstruction of an earlier Roman fort or castellum. Square
towers at the corners and smaller towners on the outside wall
slightly project from the wall, as does the headquarters building or
principia in the center of the northwest wall. The design of the el
Azraq castellum is similar to that of the smaller fort at Deir el Kahf,
43 km to the north. Both forts had rooms of two storeys and towers of
three. While the layout of rooms at el Azraq has been considerably
modified, it included stables in large rooms on the north side. The
building seen set obliquely inside the courtyard is a later mosque.
[Source: Kennedy and Riley 1990, Rome's Desert Frontier from the Air.]
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