station of al-Jizah Zizia was first definitively mentioned in 400 CE, when the
Notitia Dignitatum referred to it as a base of
Ilyrian cavalry. A Greek inscription found in one of the walls of a medieval fort in Zizia notes a repair was done on the fort's predecessor in 580. During the
Muslim conquest of
Byzantine Syria in 634, the Arab Muslim general
Khalid ibn al-Walid defeated at Zizia a coalition of pro-Byzantine
Arab Christian tribes, including the
Salihids,
Ghassanids,
Kalb,
Tanukhids,
Judham and
Lakhm. Zizia was part of the
Balqa subdistrict of
Jund Dimashq (the military district of
Damascus) during the early Islamic period. The
Umayyad caliph
al-Walid II () is held to have distributed food at Zizia for Muslim pilgrims returning to
Syria from the
Hajj in
Mecca. The early 13th-century geographer
Yaqut al-Hamawi described Zizia as a large village with a market and reservoir (
Birka Zizia) located on the Hajj pilgrimage route to Mecca. The 14th-century geographers
Abu'l-Fida and
Ibn Battuta both mention Zizia as a stop on the Hajj pilgrimage route. A fort existed at the site at least by 1569, the
Ottoman sultan issued orders to the governor of
Damascus to repair it. From the 17th century, Zizia is no longer noted as a Hajj waystation, implying that it was replaced with a site further to its east. The son of the
Druze strongman
Fakhr al-Din II, Ali Ma'n, took refuge in Zizia around 1613, to escape the pursuit of the
Sardiyya tribe, which had been commissioned by the governor
Ahmed Hafiz Pasha to capture him. The first Western account of Zizia was the description of the site by
Henry Baker Tristram, who remarked that it had been "one of the most important places of
Roman Arabia" and noted the existence of a large fort there. This fort is most likely the extant fort in al-Jizah currently used as a station for the
Desert Police. In 1881, the head
sheikh of the powerful
Beni Sakhr tribe,
Sattam Al-Fayez, made Zizia the headquarters of a subdistrict which he founded. Sattam restored the fort of Zizia, which was "furnished with a splendour unknown in the desert" according to
Gertrude Bell. During British rule, the fort served as a base for the
Arab Legion and it is now used by the Desert Police. ==See also==