خارطة مادبا
( Madaba Map )
The Madaba Map, also known as the Madaba Mosaic Map, is part of a floor mosaic in the early Byzantine church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan.
The mosaic map depicts an area from Lebanon in the north to the Nile Delta in the south, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Eastern Desert.
It contains the oldest surviving original cartographic depiction of the Holy Land and especially Jerusalem. The map dates to the sixth century AD.
The Madaba Mosaic Map depicts Jerusalem with the New Church of the Theotokos, which was dedicated on 20 November 542. Buildings erected in Jerusalem after 570 are absent from the depiction, thus limiting the date range of its creation to the period between 542 and 570.[1] The mosaic was made by unknown artists, probably for the Christian community of Madaba, which was the seat of a bishop at that time.
In 614, Madaba was conquered by the Sasanian Empire. In the eighth century, the ruling Muslim Umayyad Caliphate had some figural motifs removed from the mosaic. In 746, Madaba was largely destroyed by an earthquake and subsequently abandoned.
The newly rediscovered mosaic inside the modern Orthodox churchElements of the inscribed mosaic were noticed and reported to the Jerusalem Patriarchate in 1884 and 1886, during the preparation work for the construction of a new Greek Orthodox church on the site of its ancient predecessor.[2] Patriarch Nicodemus I of Jerusalem was informed, the church building erected and roofed over (summer 1895-August 1896), but the full mosaic was only noticed during clearing work for a new cement-slab floor in October 1896, and no research was carried out until December of that year, after the floor had already been laid around the mosaic by local workers under the supervision of a Greek architect.[2][3][4]
In the following decades, large portions of the mosaic map were damaged by fires, activities in the new church, and by the effects of moisture. In December 1964, the Volkswagen Foundation gave the Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas (lit. "German Association for the Exploration of Palestine") 90,000 DM to save the mosaic. In 1965, the archaeologists Heinz Cüppers and Heinrich Brandt undertook the restoration and conservation of the remaining parts of the mosaic.[5]
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