Masuh is a rarity – a large Roman village in the hinterland
of Philadelphia (Amman) which was not overlain 50-100 years ago by one of the
scores of modern villages that grew up on the ruins of the past. One of the
earliest aerial photographs of the site – taken by the German Air Force in
1918, shows the buried remains in isolation except for dozens of beduin tents
nearby. A vertical photograph of 1953 still shows no buildings at the site. By
1998 there were several houses and gardens eating into the ruins and chance
finds had resulted in the excavation of two churches with splendid mosaics.
Damage has continued ever since and can be traced through
successive Google Earth Images (from 2004) and APAAME’s own frequent aerial
photographs (from 2009). The results are alarming.
As the two Google Earth images show, between 2004 (Fig. 1)
and 2016 (Fig. 2) most of the houses visible at the earlier date (blue on Fig.
2) had been extended and many new houses added. The most recent aerial
photograph (taken on 28th September 2016) shows (Fig. 3) that even
the clearance that had already taken place on the northern edge between the
church (top left) and the beginning of the village itself (red circle) has had
the further attention of a bulldozer which is eating into the area of buried
housing.
Beyond the area of the village itself, our monitoring has
revealed similar destruction of cemeteries – discovered and looted and being
destroyed, and external structures damaged.
It is not too fanciful to say that this important survivor
may be largely gone in a further decade as population pressure in the vicinity
of Amman continues to grow.
The APAAME web site hosts 835 (mainly aerial) photographs of Masuh:
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| Fig. 1. Google Earth image of Masuh on 25 January 2004. Compare the location, number and extent of houses with the most recent image. |
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| Fig. 2. Google Earth image of Masuh on 25 March 2016. |
 Fig. 3. Aerial photograph taken on 28th September 2016 (APAAME_20160928_RHB-0082) |
