Image Details

Photo courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund

Philadelphia’s Odeum (see photo of Odeum) and Nymphaeum (shown here), as seen in photos taken in 1867. The Nymphaeum was probably a fountain-filled park sheltered by a half-decagon-shaped shell. When 20th-century archaeologists arrived in Amman, nothing remained of these structures (or of numerous other structures known only from old photographs, many taken by the British Palestine Exploration Fund during an 1867 survey); their remains had been dismantled and used as building material by settlers from the east who began arriving in Amman in the 1880s.