Umm ar-Rasas
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Umm ar-Rasas lies southeast of Madaba in central Jordan, on the edge of the semi-arid steppe. It began as a Roman military camp and grew into a town from the 5th century; an inscription in one of its churches names the place Kastron Mefaa. Most of the site is still buried under rubble.
The town had 16 churches, many with mosaic floors. The most important, in the Church of St Stephen, shows towns of Palestine and Egypt, among them Jerusalem, Gaza and Alexandria, labelled in Greek, and carries the names of six mosaicists. Its inscriptions date it to the late 8th century, when the region was under Muslim rule.
About 1.6 km north of the ruins stands a stone tower 14 m high, thought to have been the home of a stylite, a monk who lived in isolation on top of a column or tower; no other example survives so complete. The Studium Biblicum Franciscanum of Jerusalem began excavating in 1986, and the site was inscribed in 2004.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).