Athena Review Image Archive ™
Qasr Bshir: Satellite image of fort with plan
Qasr Bshir: satellite image of fort with plan (Google Images; Kennedy and Riley 1990 fig.21.)
The fort at Qasr Bshir sits on a hill about 18 km northeast of the legionary fortress at el-Lejjun. It occupies a wide, stony plain, cut by several wadis feeding the Wadi Mujib, which flows into the Dead Sea. Nearby to the southwest is a wadi-filled reservoir, with cisterns around and inside the fort. A Roman road passed by which linked the fort with those at Lejjun and Umm er-Resas. It belongs to the chain of forts and watchtowers known as the Limes Arabicus.
The fort is 57 x 54 m in area, with massive exterior walls 1.5 meters thick and 6 meters high, originally of two storeys, still in relatively good condition. At the corners are three-storey towers each 12 x 12 meters in area with slit windows. The central gate, facing southwest, is flanked by two smaller towers about half as wide as the corner towers. The courtyard has two cisterns, Twenty-six interior rooms, each two storeys high. line the walls around the courtyard, which held two cisterns. Kennedy and Riley (1990) identify twenty-three of these rooms as being used as stables, and project these could have accomodated 69 horses, with three horses per stable. The soldiers' living areas were in the towers and and upper-floor rooms.
Foundations of a Nabataean tower which have been identified just outside the northwest wall may represent the site's earliest occupation. Nearby are two Iron Age towers at Qasr el-Al and Qasr Abu el-Kharaq, which at the same time were reused by Nabataean soldiers, The succeeding Roman fort at Qasr Bshir was built between AD 293-305, based on a Latin inscription still above the gate (CIL 3.14149, which records that in this period, Castra Praetorii Mobeni was built from the ground up (a fundamentis) by Aurelius Asclepiades, governor of Arabia.
Recent
excavations support a construction date for the fort in the late
3rd/early 4th centuries, with ongoing use Roman into the early 5th
century. The fort was then abandoned until Umayyad occupation in the
8th century AD, when a crenelated rampart was placed above the
entrance, a typical feature after Arab conquests.
[Source: Kennedy and Riley 1990, Rome's Desert Frontier from the Air.]
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