Madaba may best be described as a village of what, in England, we should call "squatters." They are Christian exiles from the Moslem town of Kerak, who, about 1880, took possession of a city which had been in ruins some thirteen hundred years, having been devastated, according to a learned monograph upon the subject by the Dominican Père Séjourné, most probably by Chosroes, in his destructive march to or from the north. The present population, of some 900, of whom about two-thirds are Greeks, the rest Latins, occupies a small hill about 100 feet in height, of which almost a third is debris. The new residents, in digging for foundations, have brought to light a great deal that is of extreme interest and, as naturally follows, have destroyed still more. Dr Bliss, referring to the article of Père Séjourné, and describing the town in 1895, observes that certain ruins have disappeared in the meantime, and we, in turn, failed to find others which appear in the sketches of Professor Brünnow, also of 1895.
Madaba is undoubtedly a place very precious to the archæologist; to the merely æsthetic it is disappointing and sad. The ruin, the débris, the desecration, the filth of the last quarter of a century force themselves upon our consciousness to a degree difficult to overcome, and it requires an effort, of which we were little conscious elsewhere, to realise its former dignity. When Joshua was old and well stricken in years it must have been a little discouraging to him to learn that, besides other large tracts of country in this district, "all the plain of Madaba unto Dibân" remained to be possessed. Mesha, King of Dibân, over six hours' ride to the south, mentions upon the famous Moabite stone (897 B.C.) that it belonged to the Israelites in his period, the reign of Omri, but it afterwards passed into the possession of the Moabites, and, still later, into that of the Nabateans, who came hither from the south of Arabia. Madaba withstood Hyrcanus during a siege of six months about a century before Christ, and, during the Christian era, was the seat of a bishopric. Early in the seventh century, like many places on this side of Jordan, it disappears from history.
Madaba must have been a town of some importance, although the space enclosed within its walls was barely a quarter of a mile square. Père Séjourné, the Dominican archæologist, saw gates on the north and east which have disappeared, but indications remain of the existence of four. The population was well provided for as to water, for, in addition to two smaller reservoirs, a pool at the S.W. angle measures 108 yards long, by 103 yards wide, and 13 feet deep. It is now used as a field for the cultivation of tobacco, for as long as it served its original purpose it was the cause of constant feuds with the Bedu. There was a street of columns 150 yards in length. Bliss and Baedeker mention five churches, the Père Curé told us he had evidence of the existence of eight, for which almost disproportionate number the bishopric may account. The piety of to-day takes another form. Schumacher, in a valuable monograph (1895), relates that the former curé, Pater Biever, describing his ten years' experience among the people, related that the hardest things to teach them had been not to bring their sabres and other weapons into church and not to greet him, if they chanced to arrive while service was proceeding, with the usual respectful but loud-voiced, _Marhabā jā chūre!_—"May thy path be broad, O priest!"