RABBATHMOBA
later AREOPOLIS (er-Rabba) Jordan.
Town in the Provincia Arabia E of the Dead
Sea, in Moab, built on the site of the biblical town of
Ir Moab. The first settlement of the Roman period was
by the Nabateans, and the first mention in the sources is
by Ptolemy (5.16.4). In the 2d c. A.D. it was an administrative center, as is attested by documents sealed there
and found in the Dead Sea Caves, and by impressions
made by the official seal of Rabbathmoba, found in the
2d c. Nabatean necropolis of Mampsis in the central
Negev. Eusebius (
Onom. 124.15-17) states that the city
was known as Areopolis, the city of Ares, a name which
frequently figures in Byzantine sources. Ares, in the
form of the Semitic god Phanebalos, appears on another
seal impression of the city found at Mampsis. Rabbathmoba figures on the
Peutinger Table and, according to
the
Notitia Dignitatum, a unit of Illyrian cavalrymen
was stationed there. No excavations have been made,
but surveys have identified the remains of a Nabatean
temple with a tripartite plan.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
F. M. Abel,
Géographie de la Palestine
II (1938) 425; M. Avi-Yonah,
The Holy Land (1966)
117; A. Negev,
IEJ 21 (1971) 110-29.
A. NEGEV
