Madaba Map

Background

Madaba is a city southwest of Amman, the capital of Jordan. In the Old Testament it appears as "Medeba" in the land of Moab (Numbers 21:30; Isaiah 15:2). During the Byzantine period, from the fourth to the seventh century, it flourished as a Christian city, and numerous churches were built there with mosaic floors. Mosaic is a technique in which small pieces of stone or glass are set together to form an image.

Pilgrimage to places mentioned in the Bible was widespread at the time. The fourth-century church historian Eusebius compiled the Onomasticon, a gazetteer recording the locations of biblical place names. Many scholars believe that those who made the Madaba Map drew on sources of this kind.

History

• Sixth-century production: The map depicts the Nea Church in Jerusalem. Because this church was dedicated in 542, scholars generally date the map to the middle or latter part of the sixth century. Its maker is unknown.
• Neglect and damage: Madaba subsequently entered a long period of decline, and the church building collapsed. In the process, a substantial portion of the map was lost.
• Discovery in 1884: The mosaic was discovered when Greek Orthodox Christians were building a new church on the site of the old one. It reportedly became widely known to scholars in the late 1890s.
• Conservation: Several rounds of conservation and restoration were carried out in the twentieth century, and in the 1960s a German team is reported to have taken part in a major conservation project.

Content of the Map

The map is oriented with east at the top. It extends to the vicinity of Lebanon in the north, the Nile Delta in the south, the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and the desert regions east of the Jordan in the east. Its original dimensions are estimated at roughly 21 meters (69 feet) wide by 7 meters (23 feet) high, and only part of it survives today. The place names are written in Greek.

Jerusalem is depicted prominently at the center. Its walls and gates, the colonnaded main street running through the city (the Cardo), and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are all recognizably rendered. Also visible are the Jordan River with its fish, boats sailing on the Dead Sea, Jericho with its palm trees, Bethlehem, Gaza, and part of the land of Egypt. At the southern end of the Dead Sea is Zoar, known as the town in which Lot took refuge, shown with groves of palm trees. The map records both the ancient name of Zoar and the name it bore at the time (compare Genesis 19:22).

Significance and Influence

The Madaba Map has become a primary source showing where people of the Byzantine period understood biblical sites to be located. Excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem from the 1970s onward uncovered the site of the Nea Church and the remains of the Cardo, and their broad agreement with the locations shown on the map attracted scholarly attention. The map continues to be cited frequently in studies of biblical geography, archaeology, and Byzantine art.

The Church of Saint George in Madaba remains in use as an Eastern Orthodox church. It is commonly included in pilgrimage itineraries to Jordan and is visited by many pilgrimage groups from Korean churches.

Assessment

Scholars regard the Madaba Map as the oldest map of the Holy Land to survive in its original form. It is not, however, based on actual surveying; it is closer to a pictorial map depicting biblical places from the perspective of pilgrimage and faith. Consequently, its distances and proportions are not accurate, and the locations of some places differ from those proposed by modern scholarship. For this reason, researchers treat the map less as a direct representation of the geography of biblical times than as evidence of how sixth-century Christians understood the Holy Land.