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Porta Palatina, Torino

A Roman gate that was built in the 1st century CE during Augustan or Flavian age.

Turin, June 2023

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Gate of Commodus

Umm el-Jimal, Jordan

177-180 CE

In ancient times Umm el-Jimal's monumental Commodus Gate was the town's main entrance. The gate is a very simple structure, consisting of two towers, which project outside the walls, connected by two arches which spring from piers placed against the opposite faces of the towers. The towers probably served as guard-houses, and each had a doorway between the piers of the arches. The gate was almost devoid of ornament. The gate is named after Lucius Commodus, co-ruler of Rome along with his father Marcus Aurelius from 177-180 CE, after their names were discovered on an associated dedicatory inscription. (Archaeological research has confirmed the gate’s construction to the late 2nd century CE) The gate was designed as a symbol of Rome’s power on the Arabian frontier. Located on the northwest edge of the main site, remains of an ancient road lead from the gate toward nearby Qasr Al-Ba’ij and the nearby Via Trajana—the major Roman highway running from Ayla (Aqaba) to Bostra.

Sources: 1, 2

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2020 october 28 - Hierapolis

The West Gate of Chesters Roman Fort, Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland, 27.1.19.

This site shows the remains of the gate post holes and a round oven. It was overlaid by a further building in the medieval period at one end.

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Gate of the Winds (West Gate)

Bostra (Bosra), Arabia, Syria

3rd century CE

10 m. in height

The plan of the gate is composed of two square towers with pilasters at all four angles, set, over 10 m. apart, to mark the ends of the opening in the wall, and, between the towers, a double arched entrance of smaller depth than towers, the arches being flanked on either hand by two pilasters and a niche.

The two faces of the gate are almost precisely alike, the only differences being minor considerations of small measurements. In the elevation which I have drawn, i. e., the West Face, the middle part of the gate alone is represented; only the corners of the towers and their pilasters appearing on either hand. It will be observed that this middle part rises a full storey higher than the tops of the towers, the extra height being given by the tunnel vault which is still in place.

This then constitutes the gate proper. It consists of three storeys, divided by string mouldings, the lowest storey containing the wide opening and its side walls ornamented with two pilasters and a niche on either side, a middle storey embracing the arch of the opening flanked by pilasters which are carried up from those below, and an uppermost storey which forms an Attic. This Attic is almost wholly conjectural, but the high tunnel vault behind it, shown in dotted lines, must have been faced in some manner, and a single stone in place on the right side of the west face shows that the pilaster at this point was carried up another storey.

The arrangement can not be far from the original scheme. The cross section (A—B) illustrates the manner in which the space between the arches ascends, without divisions of storeys, from the pavement to the high vault. Near the top of the wall between the arches, just within the east face, is a bracket pierced through with a hole which corresponds to a block with a socket in it just within the threshold. These features are found on both sides of the east opening, i. e., the arch toward the city, and are to be regarded as the fixtures for the hinges of the great doors by which the inner arch was closed.

Each leaf of the doors was a rectangle, tall as the arch is high, hung from a round timber one end of which was inserted into the hole in one of the brackets, and the other into the socket below it, in the ancient fashion employed even for doors of stone in the Hauran. The doors, when opened, folded back into the spaces between the arches. It is not impossible that a floor was provided beneath the vault, forming a chamber above the entrance, in which some mechanism for opening and closing the great doors was set up. It would seem that the outer arch was not provided with doors.

The ornament of the two faces of this double arched gate is exceedingly simple, so simple in fact that it fails to give details that are easily dated. The pilasters which constitute the main features of the decoration have no bases, and their caps are nothing more than the string mouldings broken out to cover the shafts. The lowest pilasters have thus a double cap, the lower of which (N) is a moulding that connects the two pilasters but is not carried to the end of the wall, the upper (M) is the arch moulding which breaks out at its springing and is carried along as a string moulding as far as the walls of the towers. The moulding which forms the caps of the pilasters of the middle storey is the cornice of the towers, the uppermost moulding is conjectural.

The niches are rectangular in plan and round topped. Their decorative features were applied in an unusual manner. Each is flanked by very plain and slender pilasters with simply moulded caps and bases, in the usual way; but the mouldings of the three-piece arches are executed only upon the middle piece, or broad keystone. The face of this stone is set out from the face of the wall and is brought to a straight line above the arch mouldings to support a pediment composed of very simple mouldings. Upon the crown of the arch mouldings, and upon the apex and at both ends of the pediment, are carved small brackets, or pedestals, which resemble the bases for statues or other sculpture often seen in larger arches and pediments in Petra and Hegra. Indeed one can not fail to observe in these details a resemblance to the details of the rock-hewn facades of these two places, some of which are as early as the first century CE. The absence of any details that belong strictly to any of the Classical orders, and the likeness of certain features to those of early monuments in Hegra, might incline one to assign a somewhat early date in the second century to this West Gate.

The drawings of mouldings on larger scale here given (M and N) are not of ordinary profiles, but they are dry and hard and uninteresting, and this is perhaps the result of attempting to execute details of rather small scale in a material so hard as basalt.

(Text is told first hand by Howard Crosby Butler, who wrote the Syria series)

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4