In front of us is the ancient city of Gamla, located in the south of the Golan region in the north of Israel. It is located on a mountain, which is very narrow at its top. Its height is 330 meters. You can see that the top hill has the shape of a camel’s hump, and this is the origin of its name. Gamla in Hebrew is a derivative of the name Gamal which is a Camel.
The hill separates Daliyot and Gamla streams and is connected by a narrow saddle to a higher and flat area, where I am.
Due to the environmental conditions that encourage settlement here, such as the height of the place in terms of defense, the sources of water, and the fields of cultivation in the nearby hills, it is no wonder that the remains of an ancient village are found here. This village named Deir Qeruh, and it overlooks Gamla stream. The original name of the settlement is unknown, and we call it Deir Qeruh as the name of the village that was built on its ruins until 1967.
Deir Qeruh was founded in the 4th century, and in the 6th century a church and a fortified monastery were built here. The village was abandoned in the middle of the 7th century due to the Arab occupation and settled again 600 years later in the Mamluk period during the 13th & 14th centuries. The place was populated again in the early 20th century by a Syrian population and abandoned after the Six Day War in 1967.
In the archaeological surveys conducted in the Golan during the past decades, over two hundred settlement sites from the 2nd to the 5th centuries were located, and in dozens of them the remains of Jewish public buildings such as synagogues and schools where Torah studies took place, were discovered. This indicates the existence of many Jewish communities in the Golan region at that time.
At the time when the village existed, during the Byzantine period, the Golan Heights was also inhabited by dozens of Christian settlements.
Various buildings were found in the village, among them, one with olive oil production facility, where there is a basin for crushing olives made of basalt. I will mention on this occasion that all the buildings of the village are built of basalt.
In front of us is a church, where arches were found that supported a ceiling also made of basalt stones. The apse in the church is square and not round like in most cases, as also the one we saw in Emmaus, and this is because it is very difficult to carve basalt. On both sides of the apse are probably the rooms including the original roof, containing religious articles.
A courtyard paved with stones was found on the north side of the church. In this courtyard, an inscription in Greek was found above the entrance, and I quote: “God of Saint George, have mercy and salvage us, Amen”. This is the monastery named after Saint George. The basilica was also exposed, which does not have columns that hold wooden beams, but instead it has arches, and on top, on protruding lugs, they placed stone beams. Those cannot be too long, so that they don’t break in the middle due to their weight, and therefore the opening was reduced.
Among the remains of the village are also some buildings from the early 20th century built on the foundations of Byzantine buildings, and some of them were built from the stones of the ancient buildings.
Outside the village is a convenient place for setting up military camps, and apparently, here, Vespasian established the main camps for the three Roman legions: the fifth, tenth and fifteenth, and also for the auxiliary troops. There were tens of thousands of Roman army soldiers here, yet no remains of the Roman war camps were found. I assume they were designed for a short period of time and built in a hurry. Their stones were probably looted for later secondary construction.
The reason for setting up the camps here is also because the maximum effective range of the Roman artillery machines was at the end of this village, here in this place.
We reached the end, and as usual, I have a question for you: We are near the ancient settlement of Gamla. In which year was Gamla destroyed, the answer will appear at the end of the video.
