Ancient City of Bosra
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How it came to be
Bosra in southern Syria was a Nabataean town by the 2nd century BCE. In 106 CE Cornelius Palma, a general of Trajan, conquered the Nabataean kingdom; the town was renamed Nova Trajana Bostra and made capital of the Roman province of Arabia. The Third Cyrenaican Legion was based here, and the town prospered on the Via Traiana Nova linking Damascus with the Red Sea.
A great theatre was built in the 2nd century, and it is unusual in keeping its upper gallery colonnade. In Christian times the city was the seat of an archbishop, and in 634 the Rashidun army under Khalid ibn al-Walid took it from the Byzantines. It then became a station for pilgrim caravans travelling from Damascus to Mecca and Medina.
Under the Seljuks in the 11th century the theatre was turned into a fortress, and the Ayyubids added eight large towers around it between 1202 and 1253. In the Ottoman period the city shrank to a village. Bosra was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1980, and in June 2013 it was placed on the List in Danger with five other Syrian sites, to draw attention to the risks they faced because of the situation in the country.
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