“Castle of the Slave”—Mystery Solved

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One of the most dramatic archaeological monuments in Jordan—an admittedly Jewish one—has been repeatedly misidentified. French historian Ernest Will called it the “Finest Hellenistic monument in the Near East”¹ and considered it a château.² The structure is known locally as Qasr al-Abd, or “Castle of the Slave (or Servant).” It is part of a 75-acre estate called Airaq al-Amir (also spelled ‘Iraq el-Emir), lying 12 miles southwest of the Jordanian capital, Amman.

The site was entered via a monumental gateway, much of which remains in a ruined state and hidden by undergrowth.³ The glory of the site, however, is Qasr al-Abd, a monumental ruin destroyed by several earthquakes and partially restored by a French team between 1976 and 1986. The structure is 124 feet long and 62 feet wide (72 by 36 royal or Egyptian cubits), 046 making it exactly twice as long as it is wide, an “ideal” plan that has led researchers to regard it as a building of some special importance.

The lower of its two floors is built of massive monoliths, some of which weigh more than 28 tons. This floor has few openings, leaving the internal rooms unlit. The upper floor, in contrast, is surrounded by continuous rows of very narrow pilasters that give it the appearance of an almost completely open area. Remains of the roof are scanty but it was probably hypaethral, that is, having a large opening in the center to give light and to allow the infrequent rains to flow into a central reservoir that fed two fountains on the lower level.

Above each of the four corners of the first floor a line of four lions was carved in the stone, two males followed by two females in each group, making a total of 16 lions. In addition, some of the females have a cub crouching underneath. At roof level, two eagles were carved at each corner, and at ground level were two panther fountains. Copper spouts in the mouths of the panthers fed the fountains from plastered cisterns inside the building.

Qasr al-Abd occupies a prominent position on 047 the estate and was surrounded by a lake. Although the lake no longer exists, its long retaining wall built of earth and massive field stones on the south can still be seen in place.

The rocky, semiarid site of Airaq al-Amir is surrounded on the north by cliffs that contain banks of caves on two levels, some quite large. The caves were surveyed in 1881 by the famous British military surveyor and explorer Captain Claude Conder and his deputy, Lieutenant A.M. Mantell. One of these natural caves, they noted, was equipped with carved stone mangers and was large enough to stable a hundred horses.

A spring high up on the hillside provided water to the site. The ruins of a small nymphaeum, or decorative fountain house, still exist near the spring.⁴ From there, the water ran down into the caves and then emerged to irrigate the site, continuing throughout the terraces of the estate, finally supplementing the lake surrounding Qasr al-Abd.

Qasr al-Abd, the crowning star of the estate, was built more than 2,000 years ago by a man named Hyrcanus (not to be confused with the Hasmonean kings of Judea of the same name). This Hyrcanus was the last of the Tobiads, a prominent Jewish family from Judea. They had been major landowners during the Persian period, in the time of Nehemiah. Later family members were friendly with the Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt and supplied them with exotic animals from their estate in Transjordan.⁵

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Hyrcanus’s story is told in some detail by the Jewish historian Josephus, who lived and wrote in the first century C.E. The setting is the conflict between the two major factions that emerged after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E.: His western empire split in two: The Ptolemies took Egypt, and the Seleucids got Syria. A prominent Judean Jew named Tobiah (Tobias in English, hence the Tobiads for the family name) had a son named Joseph ben Tobiah who went to the Ptolemaic capital in Alexandria, Egypt, and obtained the right to collect taxes in Syria (which included the area later called Palestine) and Phoenicia. Joseph had eight sons, the youngest of whom was Hyrcanus. Hyrcanus may have been Joseph’s son by a dancing girl in Alexandria with whom he had fallen in love, perhaps partially explaining his brothers’ enmity toward him and his own unusually enterprising spirit. In any event, when Joseph died, Hyrcanus hurriedly visited Alexandria and bribed the royal authorities to grant him his late father’s rights as a tax collector. On his way back to Jerusalem, he was ambushed by his jealous brothers, who apparently sided with the Seleucids. After killing two of his brothers, Hyrcanus fled to Transjordan, eventually settling there permanently at the family estate known today as Airaq al-Amir. Being exiled there, he went on to modernize the old estate to current fashionable Hellenistic standards for his own comfort and that of his private army. Having laid his hands on some of his father’s fortune, and by imposing tolls on the caravans that passed the estate on their way from Judea to Transjordan and back, he was rich enough to make the renovations.

We know that Airaq al-Amir is the place of Hyrcanus’s estate because the site and its central structure, Qasr al-Abd, are described by Josephus. Qasr al-Abd was not only decorated with “beasts of gigantic size,” Josephus tells us, but it was enclosed by “a wide and deep moat.”⁶

This “moat” was a lake, as more than a century of investigation of the site has shown. Qasr al-Abd stood on a shallow island in the center of the lake.

Josephus also describes some caves in the hillside of the estate that were used for entertaining as well as for security in case of attack by Hyrcanus’s brothers or external enemies. The name TOBYAH is carved in late paleo-Hebrew script on the wall near the entrance of two of the caves,⁷ further confirming the identity of the site.

The question remains: What was the magnificent Qasr al-Abd used for? What was its function?

Ever since Qasr al-Abd was rediscovered in 1817 by three young Englishmen traveling through Egypt and Transjordan, amateurs and scholars alike have been struggling to puzzle it out. William John Bankes, the amateur classical scholar among the trio of Brits who first visited the site, identified it as the Tobiad estate described by Josephus. Josephus called the place a “baris,” and Bankes and his companions (two young naval officers) took “baris” to mean a strong fortress in Josephus’s Greek.⁸ This is 050 hardly an identification that anyone would defend today. As has often been observed, the building lies at a level below the surrounding hills—hardly a congenial site for a fortress—and today Josephus’s designation as “baris” is taken to refer to the whole fortified estate rather than just the one building.

In 1863 the well-known French explorer Félicien de Saulcy spent four days at the site. He interpreted Qasr al-Abd as a temple.⁹ Because of its animal carvings, however, he reasoned that it could hardly be a Jewish temple. Therefore, in his view, the temple must have been built as a pagan temple, perhaps a hundred years before the site was occupied by Hyrcanus. Originally, de Saulcy claimed, it was an Ammonite temple dedicated to the Ammonite god Molokh (also called Milcom). Hyrcanus, according to de Saulcy, turned it into a dwelling space. This scenario was eliminated when later on-site studies by Howard Crawford Butler of Princeton University¹⁰ demonstrated that the building had been erected later, in the early second century B.C.E., during the time of Hyrcanus, too late for the Ammonite temple hypothesis.

De Saulcy was followed by other French savants, who thought that the building might be some sort of hunting lodge.

Paul Lapp was the first modern archaeologist to dig at the site. Lapp was a brilliant young director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem (now the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research) who spent two seasons at the site in 1961 and 1962. He tragically drowned in a diving accident off the coast of Cyprus, and his excavation was never completed. He, too, had concluded, albeit reluctantly, that Qasr al-Abd was a temple, but a Jewish one.¹¹ He relied on the fact that another Jewish temple from this time was known at Leontopolis in Egypt. It had been established as an alternative to the Jerusalem Temple, which was then under the pagan occupation of its Seleucid rulers. Therefore, Lapp concluded, there may have been other Jewish temples at this time.

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For a decade beginning in 1976, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities undertook a restoration project of the site. Two French scholars (Ernest Will and François Larché) led the restoration team, in conjunction with the Jordanian archaeologist Fawzi Zayadine. The Frenchmen (as noted at the beginning of this article) concluded that Qasr al-Abd had been a domestic château. To explain the inner rooms of the ground floor that had no natural light, Will and Larché concluded that these were storage areas and that the living space was on an upper floor.¹²

The most recent analysis of the site was by Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer, the world expert on Herodian architecture (a century and a half later than Qasr al-Abd). Netzer died recently in a tragic accident at Herodium, where he had found Herod’s tomb after a 35-year search.^a Netzer variously concluded that Qasr al-Abd was a “hunting palace” or a “pleasure palace,” a place for “special, exotic entertainment.”^b It was a palace in the middle of the lake where dignitaries might be entertained and feasted. Netzer was no doubt influenced by his own excavation at lower Herodium, which featured a lake with a pleasure pavilion at the center, in which Herod could entertain royalty, including the Roman emperor who visited him there. Airaq al-Amir, on the other hand, was a backwater, far 052 from centers of visiting royalty and cultural activity. Hyrcanus was the scion of a famous family but an outcast who had decided to rebuild his property in the contemporary Hellenistic style. Herodium provides no basis for understanding Qasr al-Abd—built more than a century earlier—as a pleasure palace for entertaining guests.

My own view of Qasr al-Abd has to some extent been preceded by de Saulcy, who claimed that the structure was built as an Ammonite temple. As such, he said, the bodies of Ammonite kings were laid in state here before being transported along a steep path to the caves in the upper hillside for burial.¹³ De Saulcy traced this path in some detail, which he described as a processional way for the dead. It was lined by stones on either side with circular holes cut at the top for placing torches; however, Conder rightly believed these holes to have held pulley ropes for moving the great monoliths of Qasr al-Abd from the cave quarries down to the site.¹⁴

My view differs from de Saulcy’s, however, in several critical respects. Qasr al-Abd was not built as a temple. For one thing, it had no altar, always an essential element of a temple, and, being on a lake, access would have been difficult. But like de Saulcy, I do believe it was used for funerary purposes. Qasr al-Abd was built as a mausoleum, not only for the body of Hyrcanus himself but as a monument to memorialize the everlasting glory of the Tobiad family, of which he was the last member. He built Qasr al-Abd as a mausoleum in memory of his father, Joseph, and his distinguished Tobiad ancestors. The unlit rooms in the lower floor were planned to contain the family remains in some kind of sarcophagi, after their removal from the caves marked “TOBYAH.”

Indeed, the display tomb was the fashion of the day among the wealthy and elite. It had begun in the fourth century B.C.E. with Mausolus, king of Caria, a Persian governor on the southwestern coast of modern Turkey. At his capital Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) he built a tomb so striking and elaborate that it was included among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (the word “mausoleum,” meaning a display tomb, was created from Mausolus’s name). Although his mausoleum has not survived, there are enough clues from its remnants (many in the British Museum) and ancient descriptions that it can be fairly reliably reconstructed.^c

Inspired by this model, elaborate mausolea (or mausoleums, if you wish) appeared—for example, at Xanthos, Belevi and Cnidos, all located on or near the coast of southwestern Turkey. Each case included the Greek ideal of a heavy monumental base, in which to inter and preserve the bodies, and a light upper floor or temple-like structure used to host meals celebrating the life of the deceased. These tombs were designed by classical architects from the Greek mainland.¹⁵ It can be assumed that Qasr al-Abd was designed by a senior architect, possibly one from Alexandria, where Hyrcanus had connections. This part of southwest Turkey, known then as Lycia and Caria, was associated with the Ptolemaic empire in Egypt, so it is quite likely that Hyrcanus employed an architect who had worked 053 on the mausolea of the Lycian peninsula.

By the second century B.C.E., display tombs had also become popular in the area of greater Judea.^d The best-known examples are in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. The most-renowned, however, was 18 miles west of Jerusalem in Modi’in, the home of the Maccabees—the band of brothers who led the successful revolt against the Syrian tyrant Antiochus IV, an event still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.^e Simon, one of the Maccabee brothers, built a family mausoleum in Modi’in that was probably fashioned in the style of the Greek mausolea and was said to have seven funereal pyramids. Little trace of the Modi’in tomb has survived, but we know it in general terms from 1 Maccabees 13:25–30 and from Josephus’s description in Antiquities of the Jews.¹⁶

The mausoleum of Mausolus and those at Xanthos, Belevi and Cnidos all display common features: Lions, which guard the bodies of the deceased, adorn each of the structures. At Halicarnassus a frieze of eight lions decorated each side. At Xanthos there were four lions, one at each corner. At Cnidos a massive lion crouched on the roof.¹⁷ And at each of these sites the monument was built by the sea or by a lake, emphasizing the ritual separation, symbolized by a body of water, between the dead and the living.

Qasr al-Abd features all of these attributes as well. At each corner of the monument was a group of four lions to act as guardians. The ground floor of Qasr al-Abd was built of great monoliths with few apertures; the interior chambers were unlit. The upper floor was open and light with what must have been a number of banqueting rooms, or triclinia, to celebrate the life of the deceased. In ancient Greek religion it was believed that the spirit of the deceased actually participated in the ritual meal.

The two eagles at each of the four upper corners of the Tobiad mausoleum served as psychopomps—carriers of the souls of the dead to heaven. Whenever a Roman emperor died, part of the funerary rites involved releasing an eagle to carry his spirit to heaven.¹⁸ Qasr al-Abd’s architecture reflects this tradition.

The two panther fountains on Hyrcanus’s mausoleum would also have a Hellenistic relevance—to exemplify the Greek idea of taming wild animals in the service of mankind. When Qasr al-Abd was built, wild panthers indeed roamed the area. As recently as the 19th century, de Saulcy reported that he had to use his revolver to scare off a black panther, and a member of his team saw a panther cub foraging in the area.¹⁹ Perhaps Hyrcanus wanted his panther fountains to show that the Tobiads had the power to tame wild nature for the benefit of humanity, both in this world and the next.

With its form of construction—the heavy base and the light upper floor—the extensive menagerie of lions, eagles and panthers, and the separation by water, it is clear that Qasr al-Abd’s characteristics fit with a family mausoleum better than with any other function.

May the memory of Hyrcanus and the distinguished Tobiad dynasty now be able to rest in peace at last.

One of the most dramatic archaeological monuments in Jordan—an admittedly Jewish one—has been repeatedly misidentified. French historian Ernest Will called it the “Finest Hellenistic monument in the Near East”1 and considered it a château.2 The structure is known locally as Qasr al-Abd, or “Castle of the Slave (or Servant).” It is part of a 75-acre estate called Airaq al-Amir (also spelled ‘Iraq el-Emir), lying 12 miles southwest of the Jordanian capital, Amman. The site was entered via a monumental gateway, much of which remains in a ruined state and hidden by undergrowth.3 The glory of the site, however, is […]