Church St George de Madaba
Madaba, the old city of the mosaics is an archaeological park.
It has the oldest charts which one preserved of the Holy Land.
In the west the Mount Nébo (Mount Nebo) considered as the place is where was buried the Moïse prophet.
The morning, one visits the Greek church orthodoxe Saint George (0,55 Jd by anybody) who was built on the ruins of a Byzantine church.
Inside a priceless chart of mosaic is.
The chart was carried out with an aim of covering the ground with the Byzantine church and date of 560 after J.C. Only part of the chart could be preserved.
With the origin, it measured 15,7 meters out of 5,6 and included/understood more than 2 million fragments.
The mosaic represents a rather precise chart of the Holy Land, which extended from the phenicians cities of Tyre and Sidon in north until Egypt in the south, and of the Mediterranean in the west to the desert in the east.
The sites and the legends indicated on the chart are directed towards the east, in order to be read easily by the faithful ones which penetrated in the church.
In spite of limited space, the mosaïstes tried to locate the sites in a precise way, and numbers of them are distinguished easily: the Nile, the Jordan and Dead Sea (the fish in the river go up in opposite direction, moving away from salted water!) and the wadis (beds of river) in the east.
The mosaïstes used letters of sizes and colors (red, black and white) different, to indicate the biblical territories (red) or the relative importance of the cities.
There are 157 legends, written in Greek, and the majority of the sites were identified.
They include/understand important cities such as Jerusalem, Nablus, Gaza, Kerak and Jericho.
Symbols are also used: two turns with a door indicate a city, a church indicates a holy place. The palm trees of Jericho, the bushes and the fords along the Jordan are other symbols.
