Saturday, December 27, 2008

Jerusalem November 11-December 23

My frequent travelling in recent months came to a halt upon my return to Jerusalem from Germany. Except for a half-day Albright Institute field trip to the Bronze Age site of Yarmuth and the store rooms of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Beth Shemesh, I did not even leave the central area of Jerusalem.

I have been spending my time on the catalogue of the Arabic inscriptions in the Islamic Museum in the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. I now have a pass from the Muslim Waqf authorities, so I can enter the compound whenever I want.

I recently aquired a fancy new digital camera that takes panoramic views by automatically stitching together two or three shots. So I have been taking a lot of photographs of the Old City in recent weeks.

Most every day in Jerusalem is a holiday for someone. Id al-Adha at the culmination of the pilgrimage to Mekka on December 8 was one occasion when the Muslim part of the city largely closed down for a couple of days.


Damascus Gate on the last shopping day before Id


Damascus Gate on the first day of Id

When the pilgrims return a few days later, often the sides of their houses will be painted in celebration; I saw several fresh new ones in the Old City.

A fresh Hajj painting in the Old City

A second new Hajj painting

Id al-Adha is a gift-giving holiday, and for several days, the streets of the Muslim neighborhoods were filled with lots of young boys running around playing with their new toy guns. I overheard one group playing “Hamas and Fatah”, the local contemporary variant of “cops and robbers”.

Most days, however, are routine, although one night, the office of the Albright Institute director was burglarized; nothing significant was stolen. On December 9 a Palestinian colleague took me to the funeral of a prominent PNA person named Salim Chelebi. I am told that I may have met him a few times, but I have no real idea who he was. The funeral in the Golden Gate cemetery apparently was one of the largest Palestinian funerals in years.

The crowd at the funeral

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Germany November 1-10

I was back in Germany for the first ten days of November to attend the bi-annual archaeology conference of the German Society for the Study of Palestine.

I left Jerusalem on an early Saturday afternoon. The private shared shuttle taxi to the airport operates on Shabbat, but you have to make reservations in advance. Going through formalities at the airport this time was surprisingly quick. I was questioned by a security person for only about a minute, rather than the 45 minute long interrogations that I had experienced in the 1990s. Also I did not even have to take my lap-top computer out of my carry-on bag to go through the metal detector, as is almost always the case at other airports.

The Lufthansa flight was fully booked, and I got up-graded to business class. That meant I had one of the posh seats that fully recline to a horizontal position and an entertainment system with countless options. The three and a half-hour long flight, however, was not long enough to take full advantage of the seat; in fact I spent much of the flight having a pleasant chat with the person next to me, an Israeli traveling to Frankfurt for the opening of a new Holocaust memorial.

It is my habit when traveling for a specific event to add a day or two before and after the event for sight-seeing or visiting friends. So true to form, on Sunday 2 October I spent the day in Speyer, south of Frankfurt. The cathedral there is one of the UNESCO world heritage sites. I also visited Speyer’s archaeology and history museum and the aquarium as well as the big technology museum, where all sorts of airplanes, boats and vehicles are on display; I saw an IMAX movie about the Blue Nile there.


The Speyer Technology Museum with the cathedral in the background

On Monday November 3 I traveled to Bamberg and met various friends and colleagues. Starting on Tuesday aftenoon, I worked with my colleagues Klaus Bieberstein, the Old Testament professor at the university, and Hanswulf Bloedhorn from the University of Tübingen on our sites and monuments of Jerusalem encyclopedia. We continued work all day Wednesday and Thursday morning. There are still several months worth of work left on the project, and I am planning to return to Bamberg in the summer and fall of 2009 to finish it up.


My two colleagues and I in Bamberg (Klaus Bieberstein on the left and Hanswulf Bloedhorn on the right). Note the four computers for three people!

Then on Thursday afternoon November 6 I left with Hanswulf for Rauischholzhausen, the conference center of the University of Giessen, in north Hessen. That trip with Hanswulf was one of the very few occasions when I have travelled a long distance by car in Germany, since I normally travel everywhere in Germany by train. Hanswulf, as a typical German autobahn driver, hit peak speeds of 180 km (about 115 miles) per hour, by far the fastest I have every traveled in a car.

The theme of this year’s conference of the Deutsches Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas was Palaestina Arabica, and I gave a presentation about Arabs in Byzantine Jordan. I spoke about artistic depictions of Arabs and camels in the Byzantine-period mosaics in Jordan and then spoke about the evidence for what languages the locals spoke in the Byzantine period – whether Arabic or Aramaic.

The Rauschholzhausen conference center is a lovely 19th-century building constructed in the style of an English country manor, surrounded by extensive woods. The colorful fall tree leaves were past their prime, but still lovely. The conference was from Friday morning until Sunday noon and proved to be a good net-working occasion.

The Rauschholzhausen conference center

The woods at the Rauschholzhausen conference center

My hopes to visit some friends from the Henry Martyn Institute did not work out for Sunday afternoon or Monday, so instead on Monday I traveled to Worms, south of Frankfurt, famous for the Diet of Worms episode in the life of Luther. I toured the cathedral and other historic churches and the big Reformation monument; the museums, however, were closed on Monday, as is standard in Germany.

The Worms cathedral

The Reformation monument in Worms

I then returned to the Frankfurt airport for my late-evening flight. Regretably I did not get bumped up to business class this time. I arrived in Ben-Gurion airport at 3:45 in the morning November 11 and got through passport control remarkably quickly and was soon back at the Albright Institute.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Jerusalem September 29 - October 31

I spent the month of October at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, at the start of a six-month National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to catalogue the Arabic inscriptions in the Islamic Museum in the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

I am working with Khader Salameh, the director of the Museum. He, like the other people who work in the Haram, an employee of the Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments). Their nominal work week is Saturday through Wednesday with Thursday and Friday off, rather than Friday and Saturday like all other Jordanian government employees, just to be different from the Jews.

I, as a non-Muslim, am allowed to enter the Haram al-Sharif during the normal tourist visiting hours in the mornings and again early in the afternoons. Unfortunately that entails standing in a very long line to go through an Israeli security check with metal detectors. In recent days there have been hundreds of people in the line that takes close to an hour to get through. The Haram, however is closed to tourists on Fridays and Saturdays, and if I go to church on Sunday, then I can not go on Sundays either. That in effect leaves three days a week when I can work with Khader in the museum – Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Fortunately, that is not such a big deal, since there is a lot of work on our catalogue that I can do at the Albright Institute.

There are a couple hundred stone inscriptions that we are cataloguing, including many fragments. Many of the inscriptions are of unknown provenience, but occasionally we are able to track down where the inscriptions originally came from. For example, a few days ago we were able to determine that a previously unpublished multi-piece Fatimid period inscription that records some verses of the Quran originally was in the Dome of the Rock.

In addition to working on the catalogue of Arabic inscriptions, I also worked on a presentation about Arabs in Byzantine Jordan that I will give at a conference in Germany the first week on November.

During October I stuck close to home. But I joined the other Albright fellows on a two-day tour of archaeological sites in the upper Galilee and Golan, a part of the country that I had been to since the late 1990s. The first day we visited a synagogue site at Umm al-Qanatir and then went to Hazor and Qedesh, where two of the current Albright fellows have excavated. The second day we visited Tel Dan, Qazrin and Susita. I had not been to some of those sites before; I had not been to Hazor since 1970-1971.


The Albright group at Susita

I also spent an afternoon and evening in Ramallah visiting Khitam Jarrar, a former student of mine at the Institute of Islamic Archaeology, al-Quds University, where I taught between the end of 1994 and early 1998. Things are relatively relaxed currently, and so getting through the Israeli security check-point was quick.

The month of October saw a number of Jewish holidays, including Yom Kipur, when the Israeli west part of Jerusalem shuts down completely and the streets are deserted.


A deserted major highway on Yom Kippur


September 30 was the first day of Id al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday at the end of Ramadan and the Palestinian east part of Jerusalem shut down almost as completely.

A deserted street in the Old City on the first day of Id al-Fitr

Monday, September 29, 2008

Amman and Jerusalem September 27-29

I flew from Hyderabad back to Amman on September 27. I then spent a couple of days at the American Center of Oriental Research. Among other things I proofread the Arabic for Archaeologists booklet that I worked on in the spring.

Then on September 29 I traveled to Jerusalem. There was an unusally large number of tourists in line – a couple hundred from Indonesia, China and Korea – so that it took six hours to cross, rather than the more typical four hours.

My several months of travel are now at an end, as I start a new six-month National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Albright Institute to produce a catalogue of Arabic inscriptions in the Islamic Museum that is part of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

I arrived in Jerusalem in time for the end of Ramadan at sunset, which also coincides this year with the start of Jewish New Year. There was a parade of Palestinian bagpipe players along the street outside the Albright Institute to mark the occasion.

Hyderabad September 24-26

After spending five days in Delhi, I flew to Hyderabad into the spectacular new airport that opened in March. I spent the bulk of two days at the Henry Martyn Institute (HMI), where I had taught in the Islamic studies programs between 2000 and 2006. This was my third short trip back since I left in mid-2006. The current director is retiring in December, so there was a lot of news about the transition to get caught up on.

The HMI campus

I had dinner one evening with Christy Femila, one of my former students, who last spring finished the Masters of Theology program that HMI offers with Luther Seminary in St Paul, Minnesota. She has now joined the HMI academic staff.

Christy Femila

I had dinner a second evening with Shashi Singha, the HMI administrator, and I also spent a good deal of time chatting with Vijay Sastry, another of my former students and a HMI-Luther MTh student, who is also now on the HMI academic staff.

Vijay Sastry at my former desk

I have been impressed by how rapidly Hyderabad has been developing economically. New shopping malls are sprouting up like mushrooms, as I also observed in Delhi. One other sign of Hyderabad becoming an international city is the decision by the US State Department to open a consulate here. When it opens in a couple of months, it will be only the second consulate in the city; Iran has had a small consulate for some years due to the large 12er Shi‘ite community in Hyderabad. I had dinner my third evening with the US foreign service officer who is in charge of getting the consulate up and running; he is an interesting character who had a previous career as a singer on Broadway.

Hyderabad has suffered from some bombing incidents recently, so security is everpresent at every mall entrance; in the underground parking garage at one mall, every car gets searched. That is a level of security I once found only in Israel; Jordan also has a lot of security guards with metal dectors now at hotel and shop entrances.

I stayed my three nights in Hyderabad with Timothy Marthand, a 33-year old native Hyderabadi who is a world-class concert pianist. He has the Steinway concert grand that Arthur Rubinstein used to play in his living room.

I bought from Timothy his slightly-used iPhone. I am not sure that I really need a US $500 cell phone, but it is a neat toy to have. Timothy also passed on to me some more music for my iPod, including one piece that I was not familiar with: Boccherini’s Fandango Quintetto. The version by Andreas Staier for two harpsichords and castanettes is spectacular. (The recording is posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhzR_MYcjiU, although the sound quality leaves much to be desired).

One reason for my trip to Hyderabad was to finally take care of some stuff that I have had in storage with Vijay for the past two years. I took a lot of stuff back with me to Jordan, but I got caught for excess baggage. I arrived at the airport with luggage that weighed 43 kilos (the limit is 20 kilos) and a carry-on backpack that weighed 14 kilos (the limit is 6 kilos). I spent an hour at the counter discarding about 15 kilos of stuff, but still got hit with a US $220 charge for the remaining excess weight.

Delhi September 19-23, 2008

I have now finished an eight-day trip to India that took me to Delhi and Hyderabad. During my years in India between 2000 and 2006 I had only spent a couple of days in Delhi, so on this trip I took the opportunity to see more of the city, before I went to Hyderabad to visit friends at the Henry Martyn Institute.

I flew with Gulf Air from Amman on Thursday September 18, via Bahrain, to Delhi, arriving early in the morning of Friday September 19. Things started out badly, when I could not find my hotel for the longest time. I had picked my particular hotel because the hotel’s website, copied by the various on-line booking websites, lists it as being a couple minutes away from a metro stop near the city center, even though the hotel is in fact a couple of kilometers away from where the website puts it, about a ten minute walk from the next metro stop down the line.

Delhi’s new mass transit system is excellent. The first segments opened for service a few years ago and further lines are under contruction. In the crowded stations in the city center, the passengers actually line up in order to board the metro trains in orderly fashion.

Passengers lining up at one of the Delhi metro stations.

I arrived in Delhi about a week after a series of bomb blasts, so security was much in evidence. At the metro stations passengers have to go through metal detectors and have bags searched. The same is the case for many upscale buildings, like shopping malls. As an anti-terrorism effort, someone got the bright idea to turn garbage bins in public places upside down so that bombs can no longer be placed in them; but then neither can garbage.

Garbage bins in the Delhi zoo placed upside-down as an anti-terrorism measure.

During my five days in Delhi I did a lot of sight-seeing of places I had not been to before, including the national archaeological museum, the Qutub Minar (the first imperial mosque compound in India from the end of the 12th century), the Purana Qil‘a (old citadel) and zoo. At the Qutub Minar compound, I was interested to see the extensive reuse of architectural elements from Hindu temples; the images were all defaced. (Muslim reuse of earlier buildings or architectural elements is a favorite research topic of mine, being part of my PhD dissertation).

Hindu architectural elements reused in the mosque in the Qutub Minar compound

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Amman and Jerusalem

Since the end of the archaeological excavation at Jurash, Saudi Arabia at the end of August, I have been spending time at the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan and the Albright Institute in Jerusalem.

I did a bit of work on a number of projects, including the field report of my excavation trench at Jurash. As German language practise, I translated two articles from German into English written a century ago about the Muslim cemeteries in Jerusalem and Palestinian customs. This is in continuation of three century-old German articles about Muslim shrines in Palestine that I translated earlier this year. I do not know yet how I will publish these translations. At ACOR I also proofread the Beginning Arabic for Archaeologists booklet that I worked on in the spring and did some planning for a possible short excavation season at Humayma in southern Jordan in the spring of 2009. Although I spent most of my time in the ACOR library, I did have the chance to make a day-trip with Dino Politis to Ghor al-Safi at the south end of the Dead Sea to see his recent excavations (I had participated in his excavations at Lot’s Cave years ago). I also saw the building of the new Lot’s Cave museum, which should open in a year or so.

I also did some work on the catalogue of Arabic inscriptions in the Islamic Museum that is part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which will be my research project starting in October. The situation on the compound is a bit less tense than has been the case in recent years. In one positive development, after blocking it for years, the Israeli have finally allowed some sophisticated equipment for manuscript conservation to be brought onto the compound. So hopefully the manuscript conservation laboratory housed in the Madrasah al-Ashrafiyah can now get started on conserving the major collection of Quran manuscripts and other documents in the Islamic Museum that are in dire need of attention.

I will be leaving Amman later today (September 18) on a trip to India, which will take me to Delhi and Hyderabad, before I return to start my upcoming National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Albright Institute on October 1.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Asir and Najran

During the short-three week excavation season, we had the opportunity to do some traveling in the regions of Asir and Najran, as always with a police escort.

Our archaeological site of Jurash is located on the outskirts of the city of Khamis Mushayt. We were near an airforce base, so we were repeatedly buzzed by jets during our time at the site. Curiously, lots of baboons live around the periphery of the base.


The baboons of Khamis Mushayt

There are plenty of mosques around. One evening there was a partial lunar eclipse and so special prayers were held to mark the occasion. That was the first time I have come across such a practice.

We made a couple trips to the capital city of Abha, some forty minutes drive away. It, like the Asir mountains as a whole, has a mild climate, and so is a major draw for Saudis on vacation during the summer months.

We went to see a number of archaeological sites. Much of Saudi Arabia and the Asir region remain little explored. A regional survey is planned to be part of the next Jurash season. One major rock art site we saw was at Bir Hima, north of Najran at a point where the ancient trade routes bifurcated. At Bir Hima are two rock-cut inscriptions of Dhu Nuwas, the Jewish ruler of South Arabia in the 520s A.D., who was the ruler who massacred the Christians of Najran, an incident mentioned in the Quran (chapter 85, verses 4-9).


The excavation team in front of one of the Dhu Nuwas inscriptions at Bir Hima

Our visit to Bir Hima was part of a weekend trip to Najran, where we were hosted by the Najran office of the Department of Antiquities. We saw the archaeological site of Ukhdud (old Najran) and the archaeological museum there.

General view of the citadel area of the Ukhdud archaeological site

The excavation team and museum staff at the Najran museum

Among the other noteworthy things we saw was an early 20th century mud-brick palace in Najran. Multi-story traditional mud-brick buildings remain common in the region.


The entrance to the mud-brick palace at Najran

Jurash

Me at the Jurash excavation

The dig team flew into Abha, the capital of the Asir province on August 3 and we were met by our Saudi colleagues, who took us to a school that served as our dig house on the outskirts of the nearby city of Khamis Mushayt. The dig house is about a kilometer from our excavation site of Jurash.

Jurash is a large city site spanning the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods. The core part of the site of some 500 m by 200 m is surrounded by a fence, as are many other archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia. We spent three weeks this first season working at the site.

I excavated a 3 x 3 meter trench on a high mound down to a depth of 2 meters, but we did not bottom out during the 13 work days available. My trench had a couple of mudbrick walls and lots of garbage dump layers of ash filled with animal bones. The lower levels of my square produced virtually no pottery, so I do not really know the dates of what I was excavating, although my layers seemingly spanned numerous centuries. This season was only the second time that I have actually excavated a trench with multiple phases of occupation and lots of mud brick, as opposed to single-phase buildings defined by standing stone architecture.

My excavation trench at the start of the season

My excavation trench at the end of the season

We had 20 workmen, all Pakistanis from the region around Peshawar, who spoke Pushtu but only halting Arabic; 18 of the 20 had “Khan” as part of their names. My four workmen were the best that I have ever had. The workmen received a salary of 35 US dollars a day and stayed in a tent on the site.

My four Pakistani workmen
We worked at the site from 7:00 am to 12:00 and then returned to the school and had an afternoon session from 4:00 to 6:00 back at the site. Our first day we worked in the afternoon from 3:00 to 5:00, but the afternoon prayer time came around 3:30. The Pakistani workmen stopped work to pray, while we continued to work. That was not a problem for us, but the neighbors living in the apartment buildings adjacent to the site complained about us working through the prayer time, so we shifted our schedule to 4:00 to 6:00.

Jurash is over a kilometer high up in the Asir mountain range, so the temperatures were moderate, with daily highs in the low 80s/high 20s. The 4:00 to 6:00 period was especially pleasant. It even rained a couple of afternoons, including one substantial downpour with hail.

The set-up in our dig house / school was great. The dig team was so small that we each got our own private class room with carpeting and air conditioners, which however we did not really need to use. The meals prepared by a cook and assistant from Sudan were the best I have had on an excavation. The only thing lacking in the school was an internet connection.

Our dinner table at the school / dig house

The dig team consisted of seven of us from the US and Canada, directed by David Graf, from the University of Miami, all with lots of previous excavation experience, along with our Saudi colleagues. It did not work out to have women on the team for this first season although some women may join for the second season next year.

Due to security concerns we were always escorted by police whenever we went to the site, or anywhere else. At the end of the first week, people from the US embassy in Riyadh came to visit the site, including the deputy chief of mission with his convoy of security guards. We had a big banquet at the school for them.

The banquet with the US embassy staff

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

I am now back in Amman, Jordan, where I am spending a few days at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, and I now have the opportunity to get caught up with my blog entries about my past month in Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh

On the night of July 31-August 1 I flew from Frankfurt to Riyadh, which entailed several less than thrilling wee hours of the morning in the transit area of the Cairo airport. At noon on August 1 I was met at the airport by people from the US embassy, who took me to an apartment in the US embassy housing compound. All of the foreign embassies are located in a separate diplomatic quarter of the city with tight security. A couple of blocks away from the apartment is a small shopping complex with some fast-food outlets. Otherwise there is nothing of interest in the neighborhood. It was not possible for us to leave the diplomatic quarter without having embassy drivers take us, so we did not see much of the city. In general Riyadh is a hot, dusty and remarkably uninteresting city with only a few skyscrapers in a flat desert landscape. I must say that Riyadh is the first large city that I have been in, where I have no interest in spending any more time.

The next day, August 2 the dig team went to the US embassy to meet the deputy chief of mission and then we had a meeting with people at the Saudi ministry of tourism and antiquities. That evening the US embassy hosted a dinner for us; curiously wine and some other hard liquor was available. The degree of security around the US embassy is very tight and has some elements of overkill to it. We would be taken to the embassy in an embassy vehicle and at the entrance to the parking garage we passangers would have to show our US passports, while the vehicle got thoroughly searched. Our embassy minder, a Syrian national who has been working for the US embassy in Riyadh for seven years and who always prominently wears his security clearance badge, however, would have to get out of the vehicle and go through a security clearance office, before rejoining us to escort us through the embassy.

On August 3 we were to fly to Abha, the capital of the province of Asir in the southwest part of the country. However, our embassy minders had us fritter away so much time chatting over breakfast that we missed our flight. Saudi airlines cuts off check-in for flights 45 minutes before departure, and we arrived at the counter with only 37 minutes before departure. So we went back to the embassy apartments, while the embassy staff made arrangements for us to get on another flight to Abha that evening. That worked out okay. The deputy chief of mission accompanied us to the airport to be sure we got on the flight. It was interesting to observe the security precautions for him. His car had a vehicle full of Saudi security personel in front and another behind, who made sure that no other vehicle got close to his car as we drove down the highway to the airport. They came close to causing accidents as the hind car would swerve out to cut off cars that would attempt to overtake the convoy.

After the end of the project the dig team returned to Riyadh for a couple of days, and we had further meetings with US embassy people and people at the Saudi Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. We also had the opportunity to visit the spectacular new Saudi National Museum.

I flew to Amman on Thursday August 25; two other members of the dig team, however, were not allowed to leave, because they had not noticed the fine print on their Saudi visas that restricted their allowed period of residence to 14 days, while I and the others had received one month. Paying a fine for overstaying their visas was not an option, so they had to return to Riyadh and wait until the weekend of Thursday and Friday had passed, before they could apply for permission from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities sponsors to leave the country.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Germany Thursday July 31, 2008

I spent the past two weeks back in Bamberg, working on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project with my two German colleagues, Klaus Bieberstein, who is the professor for Old Testament studies at the University of Bamberg, and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, who came from Tübingen twice for several days of collaborative work. There is still a lot of work to do on this project, and I will probably need to spent a few months back in Germany in mid-2009 to get everything done.

One weekend I traveled to the state of Saxon-Anhalt, going first to Eisleben, the town where Luther was born and died. I toured the two museums at the houses where he was born and died and the main church of St Andreas, but heavy rain killed my enthusiasm for seeing anything else. The next day I spent in Halle. In mid-2007 I had spent a couple of days there using the university library, which is being built up as the main library in Germany for Oriental Studies.

I visited the zoo and the Frankische foundation, a remarkable cluster of buildings established as a charitable educational institution in the 18th century, but first went to the recently reopened pre-history museum to see the Nebra sky disk. This disk was discovered near Halle only a few years ago and was such a spectacular find that it prompted the renovation of the museum to have an adequate place to house it. The disk dates to prior to 1500 B.C. and can be used to determine sunrise and sunset on the winter and summer solistices, making it the oldest known astronomical device.


The Nebra sky disk

Then during my last days in Germany before my new adventure in Saudi Arabia, I travelled to Kassel in Niedersaxon to see the famous gardens at Wilhelmshöhe. These extensive gardens in the English style with fountains and water cascades were built by the megalomaniacal rulers in the 18th and early 19th centuries and are so excessive that they have made the list of UNESCO world heritage sites. The rulers had wanted to built a three-kilometer stretch of water installations down from a hillside along a straight road to the city of Kassel, but they only got the first half kilometer or so done.

The tower with the huge statue of Hercules that crowns the hill top was under renovation, but I toured the palace and the pseudo-medieval fairytale castle from the early 19th century and spent a lot of time walking around enjoying the greenery.

The water cascades at Wilhelmshöhe with the tower for the Hercules statue in the distance

The view towards Kassel from the Hercules tower


The Devil's Bridge at the Wilhelmshöhe gardens

Then on Thursday July 31 I headed to Frankfurt for my evening flight to Riyadh.

Monday, July 14, 2008

The UK, Sunday July 13, 2008

I spent the past week in the UK. During my previous brief trips to the UK, I had experienced mostly lovely sunny weather, but my luck ran out on this trip with there being overcast rain and drizzle most of the time.

On Sunday I flew into Birmingham and went to Leicester, where I met Shobha Gosa, a colleague from the Henry Martyn Institute in India, where I had worked between 2000 and 2006. She is enrolled in a Masters degree program at Oxford University. She is currently in Leicester, a city with a large immigrant population, especially Muslims and Hindus from South Asia. Shobha is on an intership at the St. Philips Centre in Leicester, an interfaith relations centre directed by Andrew Wingate, a big-wig in British interfaith relations (The state of interfaith relations in Leicester got written up in the 31 August 2006 issue of the Economist, while Prince Charles visited the Centre four days after my earlier visit in February on my way to the Islamicjerusalem conference in Dundee, Scotland). Upon my arrival in Leicester, Shobha and Andrew took me to a Muslim Women's barbeque in a park on the city outskirts. A torrential downpour did not seriously dampen the good cheer of the people there. After the barbeque, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening chatting with Shobha at the St. Philip's Centre. I returned to Birmingham late that night after my earlier train was cancelled because a conductor was not available. That my first unfortunate experience with the British train service, which in general is a notch below the German train service.

Monday I spent sight-seeing in Birmingham, while Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I was at Oxford University attending a conference on the Decapolis cities (the Greco-Roman cities of northern Jordan and Israel), sponsored by the ARAM Society. It was a good networking occasion, with a number of long-time friends and colleagues in attendence.

At Oxford I also met David Singh, another colleague from the Henry Martyn Institute, who is currently at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. He had been the HMI associate director for academics and acting director during my first two years there, before he left in 2002 to complete his PhD in Islamic studies in the UK. That brought to an end this round of visits to people connected with the Henry Martyn Institute. The next round will come when I travel to India in late September-early October. The main topic of conversation with Shobha and David were developments at the Henry Martyn Institute. The board recently appointed a new director, who will start in January.

On Friday I visited Coventry and then Stratford upon Avon. The Coventry cathedral, destroyed by the German Blitz in November 1940, was interesting, but I spent more time in Coventry's principle 21st-century monument in the city center: the multi-storey, huge IKEA retail outlet (that was the first time I had been in an IKEA store). Stratford wasn't much, made even less appealing by the pouring rain. On Saturday I took a flight to Munich from the notorious Heathrow Terminal 5, which however went smoothly, and on Sunday I returned to Bamberg.

Bamberg, Sunday July 6, 2008

I spent the past week in Bamberg in northern Bavaria. From Monday to Friday I took an intensive German course at the Treffpunkt language institute. I was in an advanced group with four other students for three hours of class each morning. I had considered enrolling in such a German course during my year in Bamberg in 2007, but I decided then that I was in Bamberg to work on my sites and monuments of Jerusalem project rather than to study German. The Treffpunkt program is excellent, but you have to pay for it at about $25 an hour ($50 per hour for private tutouring). I had not had a systematic review of such German grammatical points as the first and second subjunctive since High School.

My fellow students, the instructor and me at the Treffpunkt certificate function
I stayed for the week in a room in a private apartment, arranged through Treffpunkt. I mostly spent the afternoons in the university library, where my password for internet access is still valid, and in the evenings I mostly reconnected with people at the University. I was able to attend a public lecture on Monday about a Russian traveler to India in the 15th century and a public lecture on Thursday about the Tablighi-Jama'at Muslim prosletizing organization, while Wednesday was the semester party for the Faculty of Catholic Theology, with which I was formally affiliated in 2007.

Then on Friday afternoon and all-day Saturday was the annual conference of the Ernst Herzfeld society for Islamic Art, sponsored this year by the University of Bamberg Oriental Studies department, which has an Islamic Art and Archaeology program. In 2007 I had taught three courses under their auspices. At the conference I gave a presentation about an overlooked Ottoman period inscription in Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif. I had considered giving the talk in German, but I chickened out and gave it in English. I had attended last year's conference in Vienna.

After traveling in the second week of July to Oxford University for a conference, I will be back in Bamberg for the second half of July.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Back in Germany, Sunday June 29, 2008

I am now back in Bamberg in northern Bavaria, having arrived just in time for the Germany-Spain Football final. I had spent 2007 here as visiting professor at the University of Bamberg, working on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem encyclopedia project. I will be here for most of July.

I arrived in Frankfurt on Wednesday morning and spent the next few days as a tourist and visiting friends from my days at the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad. On Wednesday I went to the city of Fulda and saw its attractive baroque period old city core.


Then on Thursday I went to Marburg, where I met two friends from HMI. Andreas Günther had been around at HMI during the 2005-2006 academic year and he took some of my Islamic studies courses. Since June he has been serving as pastor for a church congregation in the city of Giessen. His friend Mareike Hilbrig had been around at HMI for a few months in late 2005 and early 2006. She is a private piano teacher in Marburg and she is studying to be a conductor for choirs.


Andreas Günther and Me

Andreas Günther and Mareike Hilbrig

Then on Friday I visited Armin Rosswaag, another former student of mine at HMI. Since September Armin has been serving as pastor in Rohr, a small village in southern Thüringen, in a church that goes back to the early ninth century. Armin had been around at HMI in the fall of 2003. He is now engaged to Terini, another former HMI student of mine from the northeast Indian state of Mizoram. Terini, Andreas Günther, Mareike Hilbrig and I had been particularly good friends during my final months at HMI in early 2006.



Armin Rosswaag

On Saturday I went to Eisenach, where I visited the Wartburg castle, among other sites, before returning to Rohr to spend a second night with Armin. Sunday I saw the sites of the city of Meiningen, near Rohr, while on my way to Bamberg. During 2007 most every weekend I had gone sightseeing somewhere, but there are still a lot of places in Germany that I have not yet been to.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Goodby to Jordan, Tuesday June 24, 2008

This evening I leave Jordan. I have spent the past four months as a research fellow at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, writing the final reports of my archaeological excavations at the site of Humayma in southern Jordan in the 1990s. My involvement in the project directed by John Oleson of the University of Victoria in British Columbia focused on the evidence for Christians in the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods, the topic of my PhD dissertation. At the end of this post is a shorted version of my fellow's report blurb. The slightly longer version will be in the next ACOR Newsletter.

On Sunday and Monday I was in Petra as a guest of the archaeology department of King Hussein University at their newly established campus. I gave a lecture there about Christianity at Humayma, which was exceptionally well-received. After almost chickening out, I gave the presentation in Arabic, the first time that I have given a public presentation in Arabic since my teaching in Jerusalem in the late 1990s. I also had the opportunity to visit their new student training excavation at the Roman legionary fortress of Udhruh, near Petra.

In recent days I got involved in the controversy about the "oldest church in the world". A Jordanian archaeologist with overly-active fantasies got a lot of international press coverage by announcing recently his discovery of what he wants to be a cave church in use between 33 and 70 A.D. at a village site of Rihab, in northern Jordan. Some years ago he had excavated the church above the cave that has a Greek inscription that he wants to date to 230 A.D. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Jordan Times, indicating how highly unlikely (ridiculous is a less diplomatic way of putting it) the date of 230 A.D. is. Nobody takes his claims seriously. The church is a standard basilica from the 6th-7th centuries A.D., like the other known churches at the site.

I fly this evening to Germany, with Etihad Airlines, via Abu Dhabi. That way costs US$200 less than a direct flight from Amman to Frankfurt, while adding only eight hours to the flight time. I will spend the bulk of July back in Bamberg, where I was in 2007. Then in August I will take part in an excavation in Saudi Arabia. I got the news yesterday that the Saudis have awarded our visas, so everything looks set now for that new adventure.

ACOR Fellow's Report: Christianity in Humayma, Jordan

I had spent a lot of effort on the C101 "Lower Church", the best preserved of the five known churches at the site. It was a standard basilica constructed in the 5th-6th centuries A.D. with three apses at the east end. Several crosses carved into flagstone pavers in the nave and side aisles marked burials of two men, two women and a young girl; one of the burials inside a wooden coffin even had its desiccated brain still preserved. There was a single entrance to the church on the north side, while a row of rooms along the south side of the church were used for domestic occupation. Enough of the marble furnishings survived to show that the church had the standard set of chancel screen panels, a pulpit, an altar and a basin for holy water.

The excavation of the C101 church proved to be exceptionally informative for understanding how the building went out of use. The altar, pulpit, chancel screens and other marble liturgical furnishings were broken up and most of the fragments were removed from the church, at a time when the building remained structurally intact. Only later did the walls collapse and the roof burn down, leaving a thick layer of ash. A cluster of intact pottery vessels from the mid-7th century in one of the south rooms provide the best evidence for dating the last phase of occupation of the church, while a bread oven in the northeast sacristy room points to non-church occupation of that room in the Umayyad period.

Humayma's principal claim to historical fame came in the early eighth century when the members of the Abbasid family lived there as they organized their ultimately successful revolution against the Umayyad caliphate in 749-750 AD; the first two Abbasid caliphs were born here in the early 8th century. So it is especially interesting to determine what the Christian presence at the site was at the time. The C101 church seems to have gone out of use by the mid-7th century, well before the Abbasids arrived, while two other churches were completely built over by domestic houses in early 8th century.