The Decapolis (Greek: Δεκάπολις, Dekápolis, 'Ten Cities') was a group of ten cities on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire in the southeastern Levant in the first centuries BC and AD. They formed a group because of their language, culture, location, and political status, with each functioning as an autonomous city-state dependent on Rome. They are sometimes described as a league of cities, although some scholars believe that they were never formally organized as a political unit.
The Decapolis was a center of Greek and Roman culture in a region which was otherwise populated by Semitic-speaking people (Nabataeans, Arameans, and Canaanites). In the time of the Emperor Trajan, the cities were placed into the provinces of Syria and Arabia Petraea; several cities were later placed in Syria Palaestina and Palaestina Secunda. Most of the Decapolis region is located in Jordan, except Damascus (in Syria), and Hippos and Scythopolis (in Israel).
Except for Damascus, the Decapolis cities were by and large founded during the Hellenistic period, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the Roman conquest of Coele-Syria, including Judea in 63 BC. Some were established under the Ptolemaic dynasty which ruled Judea until 198 BC. Others were founded later, when the Seleucid dynasty ruled the region. Some of the cities included "Antiochia" or "Seleucia" in their official names (Antiochia Hippos, for example), which attest to Seleucid origins. The cities were Greek from their founding, modeling themselves on the Greek polis.
The Decapolis was a region where two cultures interacted: the culture of the Greek colonists and the indigenous Semitic culture. There was some conflict. The Greek inhabitants were shocked by the Semitic practice of circumcision, while various elements of Semitic dissent towards the dominant and assimilative nature of Hellenic civilization arose gradually in the face of assimilation.
The Roman general Pompey conquered the eastern Mediterranean in 63 BC. The people of the Hellenized cities welcomed Pompey as a liberator from the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom that had ruled much of the area. When Pompey reorganized the region, he awarded a group of these cities with autonomy under Roman protection. This was the origin of the Decapolis. For centuries the cities based their calendar era on this conquest: 63 BC was the epochal year of the Pompeian era, used to count the years throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods.
The Romans left their cultural stamp on all of the cities. Each one was eventually rebuilt with a Roman-style grid of streets based around a central cardo and/or decumanus. The Romans sponsored and built numerous temples and other public buildings. The imperial cult, the worship of the Roman emperor, was a very common practice throughout the Decapolis and was one of the features that linked the different cities. A small open-air temple or façade, called a kalybe, was unique to the region
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Most of the cities continued into the late Roman and Byzantine periods. Some were abandoned in the years following Palestine's conquest by the Umayyad Caliphate in 641, but other cities continued to be inhabited long into the Islamic period.
Jerash (Gerasa) and Bet She'an (Scythopolis) survive as towns today, after periods of abandonement or serious decline. Damascus has never lost its prominent role throughout later history. Philadelphia was long abandoned, but was revived in the 19th century and has become the capital city of Jordan under the name Amman. Twentieth-century archaeology has identified most of the other cities on Pliny's list, and most have undergone or are undergoing considerable excavation
From Pliny's Natural History we have the traditional listing of the Decapolis as
- Gerasa (Jerash) in Jordan
- Dium later Capitolias also Dion, Aydoun in Arabic, in Jordan
- Scythopolis (Beit She'an) in Israel, the only city west of the Jordan River
- Hippos (also Hippus or Sussita; Al-Husn in Arabic) on the Golan Heights
- Gadara (Umm Qais) in Jordan
- Pella (west of Irbid) in Jordan
- Philadelphia, modern day Amman, the capital of Jordan
- Canatha (Qanawat) in Syria
- Raphana, usually identified with Abila in Jordan
- Damascus, the capital of modern Syria