sites would have provided a resource for nomadic pastoralists and
agriculturalists alike, providing irrigation for the agricultural devel-
opments at the qus
ūr. The control of water supplies was, as well, a
necessary and integral function of Roman military sites, which were
located in marginal land throughout the Near East.
44
It would be unwise to suggest simply that the Umayyads used such
sites because the Jafnids did, because this implies a conscious inten-
tion on the part of the Umayyads to imitate the Jafnids, and there is
no evidence that this was the case.
45
On the other hand, there are
some potential reasons why such sites would be attractive to the
Umayyads, and, in many ways, these were probably the same reasons
that made them popular with the Jafnids. For Res
āfa these were most
likely the power of the shrine of St Sergius (which, as Elizabeth
Fowden notes, was undoubtedly not lost on the Muslims) and the
location of Res
āfa itself. The city was far from the centre of political
life in Damascus for the Umayyads, and suitably distant from the
political machinations of Roman power, for the Jafnids. It was a place
in-between, usefully located at a geographical and conceptual mid-
point linking western Syria and Mesopotamia.
46
Of interest as well is the communicative potential of sites where
qus
ūr were founded. At present there is no exact consensus on the
function and nature of many of the qus
ūr, but part of the debate has
focused on the very plausible suggestion that they were well-sited to
maintain communication with the disparate groups that made up
Umayyad Syria.
47
As discussed in Chapter 2, the location of the
good support for plants and birds. It is easy to imagine that this place offered an
important if seasonal water supply.
44
For example, at Lejjūn, which is sited somewhat indefensibly in a valley to guard
a spring, as well as al-H
˙
umayma, where the site features an aqueduct and several
subterranean cisterns and reservoirs, originally developed by the Nabataeans but
enlarged during the Roman occupation of the site. See as well G. King, ‘Settlement
patterns in Islamic Jordan: the Umayyads and their use of the land’, in A. Hadidi (ed.),
Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, iv (Amman, 1992), 369–75, at 372.
45
Cf. again Shahid, Sixth Century, ii/1, 377, on Res
āfa: ‘the caliph Hishām had
been inspired by the fact that the Arab federates had, in pre-Islamic times, developed
it as a veritable oasis and thus had prepared it for later Umayyad takeover.’
46
E. K. Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 177–8; id., ‘The lamp and the wine flask: early
Muslim interest in Christian monasticism’, in A. Akasoy, J. E. Montgomery, and P. E.
Pormann (eds.), Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East
(Exeter, 2007), 1– 28, at 11; King, ‘Settlement patterns in Islamic Jordan’, 375.
47
For a useful summary of the literature, see D. Genequand, ‘Umayyad castles: the
shift from late antique military architecture to early Islamic palatial building’,in
206 The Jafnids and History in East and West