Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

938 31. building and architecture
Khuraybah, Gasr Mismar, Uadi Senab), Syria (Neocaesarea), Arabia (Gerasa)
and Palestine (Emmaus, Philoteria). 32
Small public baths were also built in villages; several are known from the
period in northern Syria, at Androna (in c. 558) and elsewhere. The baths at
Sergilla (built 473), which has latrines (Fig. 9,p.331 above), and at Midjleyya
are composed of two parts: on the north, a large hall serving as lounge and
apodyterium, and on the south, a row of small hot rooms; elevated stone conduits
projecting from the façades fed water from a cistern outside. Of similar
plan, a bath at Babisqa (dated 488) has an interior space split into several
levels and transformed by arcades. On the evidence of these village baths,
certain trends have been ascribed to bath architecture in the eastern provinces:
the disappearance of the palaestra, the reduction of the frigidarium, the
appearance of a spacious bath hall with fountain or pool, and the replacement
of a large communal pool by small pools. 33 However, contemporary
and later baths at and near Antioch, at Scythopolis (Fig. 47) and at Caesarea,
provide contradictory evidence for the continuation of the frigidarium. 34
One of the largest thermo-mineral baths in the Roman world is situated
next to hot springs at Gadara in Palaestina Secunda (Fig. 48). Built of basalt
ashlar blocks with rubble core and probably roofed in concrete barrel vaults,
it covers an area c. 50×70 metres. First mentioned in the mid third century,
the baths complex has three inscriptions recording work in 443–60 by the
empress Eudocia, an enlargement in a later period, and modifications in 664
under the Umayyad caliph Mu�awiya, when some pools were filled in to
create dry halls. It has no artificially heated chambers as there were in some
thermal baths. The hot spring was enclosed in a small pool within one of the
bath’s six interconnecting rooms (most with pools), which are compactly laid
out parallel or at right angles to each other. The baths were entered through
a long corridor, perhaps an apodyterium, which opened on to three rooms, one
having a colonnaded entrance with arcuated lintel. An oval room next to the
spring may have been the caldarium, and the hall (55 metres long) furthest
from the springs, the frigidarium. The bath may be that mentioned by the
pilgrim from Piacenza in c. 570 when he described lepers bathing at Gadara. 35
Baths continued to be built within palaces and villas in this period. In
Gaul, Sidonius Apollinaris describes the bath suite with colonnaded
entrance in his villa at Avitacum, which had a caldarium, afrigidarium (with
‘conical roof ’) and a pool filled by a mountain stream through lion-headed
spouts. The winter bath in the villa of his friend Pontius Leontius was likewise
fed from a stream. The villas of other friends (Consentius, Ferreolus
32 Nielsen (1990) catalogue nos. 284, 294, 312, 314, 319, 326–31, 338, 341, 347, 356–9, 370, 372, 373,
379, 387; Yegül (1992) 324–5. 33 Yegül (1992) 329–39; Charpentier (1994) 113–42.
34 Bath F at Antioch and bath at Toprak en-Narlica nearby: Stillwell (1941) 8–9, 19–23; Scythopolis:
Tsafrir and Foerster (1997) 113, 131–2 and nn. 123–4; Caesarea: Holum (1988) 182–4.
35 Yegül (1992) 121–4.
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