Gharandal () is a town in the

Tafilah Governorate Tafilah () is one of the governorates of Jordan, located about 180 km south-west of Amman, Jordan's capital. Tafilah Governorate is bordered by Karak Governorate to the north, Ma'an Governorate to the east and south, Aqaba Governorate to th ...

in southern

Jordan Jordan, officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Jordan is bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian ter ...

, located about south-southeast of the governorate capital

Tafilah Tafilah (, ), also spelled Tafila, is a city with a population of 27,559 people in southwestern Jordan, located southwest of Amman. It is the capital of Tafilah Governorate. It is well known for having green gardens which contain olive and fig ...

. It is identified with Arindela (), a town in the late

Roman province The Roman provinces (, pl. ) were the administrative regions of Ancient Rome outside Roman Italy that were controlled by the Romans under the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire. Each province was ruled by a Roman appointed as Roman g ...

Palaestina Salutaris Palaestina Salutaris or Palaestina Tertia was a Late Roman and Byzantine province, which covered the area of the Negev, Sinai (except the north-western coast) and south-west of Transjordan, south of the Dead Sea. The province, a part of the Dio ...

, also called Palaestina Tertia.

History

Byzantine period

The town, situated at above sea level, became prominent in

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman E ...

times, ranking third among the cities of

Palaestina Tertia Palaestina Salutaris or Palaestina Tertia was a Late Roman and Byzantine province, which covered the area of the Negev, Sinai (except the north-western coast) and south-west of Transjordan, south of the Dead Sea. The province, a part of the Dio ...

. Arindela was also a Christian bishopric. One of its bishops, Theodorus, took part in the

Council of Ephesus The Council of Ephesus was a council of Christian bishops convened in Ephesus (near present-day Selçuk in Turkey) in AD 431 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius II. This third ecumenical council, an effort to attain consensus in the church th ...

in 431. Another, Macarius, participated in a council held at Jerusalem in 536. No longer a residential bishopric, Arindela is today listed by the

Catholic Church The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

as a

titular see A titular see in various churches is an episcopal see of a former diocese that no longer functions, sometimes called a "dead diocese". The ordinary or hierarch of such a see may be styled a "titular metropolitan" (highest rank), "titular archbi ...

.''Annuario Pontificio 2013'' (Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2013 ), p. 839

Early Muslim period

Arindela became known as Arandal under Arab rule, which began after it was conquered during the early stage of the

Muslim conquest of Syria The Muslim conquest of the Levant (; ), or Arab conquest of Syria, was a 634–638 CE invasion of Byzantine Syria by the Rashidun Caliphate. A part of the wider Arab–Byzantine wars, the Levant was brought under Arab Muslim rule and developed ...

in . It was held by

al-Baladhuri ʾAḥmad ibn Yaḥyā ibn Jābir al-Balādhurī () was a 9th-century West Asian historian. One of the eminent Middle Eastern historians of his age, he spent most of his life in Baghdad and enjoyed great influence at the court of the caliph al ...

to have surrendered without resistance to one of the chief commanders of the conquest,

Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan ibn Harb ibn Umayya (; died 639) was a leading Arab Muslim commander in the conquest of Syria from 634 until his death in the plague of Amwas in 639. Following the capture of Damascus around 635, he was placed in command of ...

. It became part of the large military district of Damascus. The 9th-century geographer

al-Yaqubi ʾAbū al-ʿAbbās ʾAḥmad bin ʾAbī Yaʿqūb bin Ǧaʿfar bin Wahb bin Waḍīḥ al-Yaʿqūbī (died 897/8), commonly referred to simply by his nisba al-Yaʿqūbī, was an Arab Muslim geographer. Life Ya'qubi was born in Baghdad to a fam ...

mentions that it was the center of the Jibal subdistrict and its population at that time consisted of

Ghassanid The Ghassanids, also known as the Jafnids, were an Arab tribe. Originally from South Arabia, they migrated to the Levant in the 3rd century and established what would eventually become a Christian kingdom under the aegis of the Byzantine Empi ...

and

Balqayn Banū al-Qayn () (also spelled Banūʾl Qayn, Balqayn or al-Qayn ibn Jasr) were an Arab tribe that was active between the early Roman era in the Near East through the early Islamic era (7th–8th centuries CE), as far as the historical record is c ...

tribesmen. By the 10th century, the center of Jibal shifted to the neighboring town of Ruwath. In the 13th century, it is mentioned as a village by the geographer

Yaqut al-Hamawi Yāqūt Shihāb al-Dīn ibn-ʿAbdullāh al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī (1179–1229) () was a Muslim scholar of Byzantine ancestry active during the late Abbasid period (12th–13th centuries). He is known for his , an influential work on geography con ...

Modern period

The Byzantine and Islamic remains of old Gharandal, the name by which it is presently known, have largely been overtaken by the modern town of the same name. Most of the modern town's population, which was 4,680 in the 2015 Jordanian census, were originally from nearby Buseira and the town is part of the Buseira District of the Tafilah Governorate.

References

Bibliography

* * * *{{cite book, title=Palestine Under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1500, url=https://archive.org/details/palestineundermo00lestuoft , first=G., last=Le Strange, author-link=Guy Le Strange , year=1890, publisher=Committee of the

Palestine Exploration Fund The Palestine Exploration Fund is a British society based in London. It was founded in 1865, shortly after the completion of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem by Royal Engineers of the War Department. The Fund is the oldest known organization i ...

Archaeological sites in Jordan Catholic titular sees in Asia Populated places in Tafilah Governorate Ghassanids