Madaba Map (Church of St George)

The Madaba Mosaic Map is set into the floor of the modest nineteenth-century Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George in the centre of town, and is the single thing that puts Madaba on the world map. Made around 560 AD, it is the oldest cartographic representation of the Holy Land in existence, showing 157 named places stretching from the Nile delta to the Lebanese coast.

The level of detail is extraordinary: the gates and main streets of Jerusalem, the Dead Sea with fish, the fortified town of Jericho, boats sailing the Jordan, palm trees at the oases. The remaining fragments cover a few square metres in the nave; a numbered key by the door helps you identify what you're looking at. Entry is JD 1 — the cheapest serious antiquity in Jordan.

things to do sight
A story
The map was discovered by accident in 1884 during the construction of a new Greek Orthodox church on top of a Byzantine ruin. The builders found a mosaic floor and the local schoolteacher recognised what it might be. Of the original mosaic — roughly 21 by 7 metres, with around two million tesserae — only about a quarter survives, including the famous depiction of Jerusalem with the colonnaded Cardo running through the city.