The South Baths of Bosra

South of the colonnaded street stands a square basalt hall that has lost its dome, with the walls of other rooms spreading out around it. This is the best-preserved bath complex in Bosra. It covers about 8000 square metres and is one of the largest Roman public buildings in the city after the theatre. Its foundations go back to the Nabataeans and it worked as a bath house until the Umayyads, so a single building spans six centuries of the city’s life.

Where it is and how to get there

South of the junction where the main east-west street meets the north-south street that runs down to the camp. Walk north from the theatre towards Bab al-Qandil, and the baths are on your right, to the east. The Central Baths are across the street.

What to see

The first thing you meet is the square hall, with arched openings on all four sides. The hot rooms on the west were uncovered in recent excavations. The load-bearing structures and the water installations still in place let you follow how the building grew: cold, warm and hot sections, halls and palaestras, the exercise courts of a Roman bath. According to Butler, a channel brought water to the baths from Birket al-Hajj in the south-east of the city.

How many phases

Before the baths, there were Hellenistic or Nabataean houses in the western part. The Nabataean phase belongs to the late 1st and early 2nd century: a wall under the column base of the west palaestra is dated by Nabataean pottery. Roof tiles like those in the eastern quarter, and fragments of the small piers that held up a heated floor, suggest the building was already a bath at that point.

The first monumental Roman building dates from the second half of the 2nd century. It grew with added halls and palaestras, and it was abandoned as a bath house in the Umayyad period.

What not to miss

Cross to the east side of the baths. A residential quarter excavated in the 1990s lies there: a Byzantine church with a temple of Nabataean origin beneath it, an Umayyad house with its stables, and the “new praetorium”, the governor’s residence known from an inscription dated 490. The baths make sense when you see them with this neighbourhood.

Current state

A 2007 source noted that some rooms could not be visited for safety reasons. Which parts are open today could not be confirmed, and there may be loose stone at the foot of the walls.