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.

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