Gharandal ( ar, غرندل) is a town in the

Tafilah Governorate Tafilah ( ar, الطفيلة) 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, Aqab ...

in southern

Jordan Jordan ( ar, الأردن; tr. ' ), officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,; tr. ' is a country in Western Asia. It is situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, within the Levant region, on the East Bank of the Jordan Rive ...

, located about south-southeast of the governorate capital

Tafilah Tafilah ( ar, الطفيلة, 'aṭ-Ṭafīlah, ), also spelled Tafila, is a town with a population of 27,559 people in southern Jordan, located southwest of Amman. It is the capital of Tafilah Governorate. It is well known for having green gard ...

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

Roman province The Roman provinces (Latin: ''provincia'', pl. ''provinciae'') 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 rule ...

Palaestina Salutaris Palaestina Salutaris or Palaestina Tertia was a Byzantine (Eastern Roman) 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.

Description

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

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

times, ranking third among the cities of

Palaestina Tertia Palaestina Salutaris or Palaestina Tertia was a Byzantine (Eastern Roman) 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 Dioce ...

. 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 largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

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 archbish ...

.''Annuario Pontificio 2013'' (Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2013 ), p. 839 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 ( ar, فَتْحُ الشَّام, translit=Feth eş-Şâm), also known as the Rashidun conquest of Syria, occurred in the first half of the 7th century, shortly after the rise of Islam."Syria." Encyclopædia Br ...

in . It was held by

al-Baladhuri ʾAḥmad ibn Yaḥyā ibn Jābir al-Balādhurī ( ar, أحمد بن يحيى بن جابر البلاذري) was a 9th-century Muslim historian. One of the eminent Middle Eastern historians of his age, he spent most of his life in Baghdad and ...

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 ( ar, يزيد بن أبي سفيان بن حرب بن أمية, Yazīd ibn Abī Sufyān ibn Ḥarb ibn Umayya; died 639) was a leading Arab Muslim commander in the conquest of Syria from 634 until his de ...

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

al-Yaqubi ʾAbū l-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 and perhaps the first historian of world cultu ...

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

Ghassanid The Ghassanids ( ar, الغساسنة, translit=al-Ġasāsina, also Banu Ghassān (, romanized as: ), also called the Jafnids, were an Arab tribe which founded a kingdom. They emigrated from southern Arabia in the early 3rd century to the Levan ...

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 Empire, Roman era in the Near East through the early Islamic era (7th–8th centuries CE), as far as the historical ...

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) ( ar, ياقوت الحموي الرومي) was a Muslim scholar of Byzantine Greek ancestry active during the late Abbasid period (12th-13th centuries). He is known fo ...

. 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, and is the oldest known organization in the world created specifically for the study ...

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