Namara Roman Fort

A Roman frontier post in southern Syria, on the western edge of the Safa basalt field. It was built near the eastern end of the Limes Arabicus, the line that guarded the Roman province of Arabia Petraea. What survives on the ground is footings and scattered blocks of basalt. What made the place famous is not the stone but the writing on it.

Getting there

It lies roughly 100 kilometres south-east of Damascus and 50 kilometres north-east of Bosra. There is no sealed road. Tracks fade in the black stone field, and nobody drives out here without a local driver. There is no village nearby, no sign, no ticket office and no shade.

What to see

The rectangular plan of the castrum and the base courses of its walls can still be read on the ground. Everything around is basalt. The Safa lava sheet draws the eastern limit of the Hauran plain here, and the post sits exactly on that limit — this is the place that shows in one look where Rome stopped and the desert began.

What not to miss

The Namara inscription is not here; it is in Paris. In 1901 René Dussaud and Frédéric Macler found a basalt block carved with five lines: the epitaph of Imru al-Qays son of Amr, a Lakhmid king, dated 328. The text catches Nabataean script in the act of turning into Arabic script and counts among the earliest long inscriptions known in the Arabic language. The stone is on display in the Louvre under inventory number AO 4083. Look at it before you come, or you will not know what you are looking for out here.