Life on the Cardo

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The Old City by night is very different from the daytime version.

The tall columns of the Byzantine Cardo cast spooky shadows.

As part of their training, soldiers learn about Israel and Jerusalem.

The guide is probably telling the young men and women that they stand on the 6th century Byzantine Cardo, which was the continuation of the Roman Cardo.

The Latin term cardo means pivot/"hinge"/axis, and by extension, the street around which city life revolves.
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I wonder if pagan Roman Jerusalem had as many cats as the Old City does today.

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The Romans were big on urban planning and almost every city they built throughout the Empire had a cardo crossing the city from north to south.

You can see Jerusalem's main cardo, secondary cardo, and the recently discovered decumanus on the old Madaba mosaic map.

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Jerusalem's Cardo Maximus was a wide stone-paved road with sidewalks, colonnades (a series of regularly spaced columns supporting an entablature and usually one side of a roof), and shops along its length.

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These wooden bits in the photo were reconstructed to show how a shop would have been covered to keep merchandise dry in the winter and to shield merchants from the blazing summer sun.

The pigeon up there thinks it's a perfect perch!

How do you say pigeon in Latin?

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With its animals and shadows, this post is for Camera-Critters and Shadow Shot Sunday memes.

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Madaba mosaic map

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Photo by Kay of Musings

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For ABC Wednesday M-Day let's look at the magnificent Madaba mosaic map.

Craftsmen made it from more than two million colored tesserae sometime between the years 542 and 570.
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The photo above shows the surviving parts of the mosaic, in situ in the church in the Arab village of Medeba in Jordan, where it was rediscovered in 1892.

Kay, my friend in Hawaii, author of the fine blog Musings, was actually there and sent me this picture!

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This photo shows our reproduction of the Jerusalem section of the map. It hangs near the Cardo in the Old City.

Yes, the same central Cardo that Israeli archaeologists in 1967 searched for and found (and later restored), based on this map! (It's the colonnaded road going across the map, starting at Damascus Gate on the left.)

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This year archaeologists dug near the Jaffa Gate (at the bottom of the map) and were thrilled but not surprised to find the Decumanus (the Roman road which led up to the Cardo), shown with a sharp right angle here above.

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And in 2006 my trowel was one of the lucky ones to first scrape through to the big beautiful paving stones of the Secondary Cardo (visible at the top of the map, its row of columns showing).
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The Madaba mosaic is also a devotional map, so the most important church, the Holy Sepulchre, and also the Nea Church are distorted out of proportion to the rest of the city in order to show their conceptual importance for the Christians.

And naturally, the Byzantine Jerusalem depicted has the East on top.

Being the oldest surviving original cartographic depiction of the Holy Land, the Madaba map is famous and beloved in our country and you find it on postcards, ceramics, and all kinds of souvenirs.

But a few days ago I had to laugh to find it on a kneeling cushion in St. George's Anglican Cathedral in east Jerusalem!

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I could go on and on about the fascinating history and value of this map.

But I recommend you play around with your mouse on this great 3D map with overlays.

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And you can see the Greek Orthodox church in Jordan where the mosaic resides at BiblePlaces.com.

The Franciscans have a virtual tour of the Madaba map, based on the book by Piccirillo.

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Have fun!

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