Pella, Jarash and `Amman: old and new in the crossing to Arabia, ca. 550-750 CE

In crossing from Baysan in the Jund al-Urdunn to 'Amman in the Balqa' district of the Jund Dimashq, the traveler of the third or fourth decade of the second/ eighth century would have passed through a reworked urban world with similarities to and differences from the world of two centuries earlier. The results were generally favorable, in that the new had been almost seamlessly accommodated within the old. The mosque at Jarash, the citadel complex of Anm1.an, and that of Baysan leave little doubt that the new political-economic-religious entity manifested in a new Muslim elite wrought significant changes to the post-Classical urban history of middle-ranking towns in Bilad al-Sham, and not just in the main cities of, for instance, Damascus and Jerusalem