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 For example, a few days ago we were able to determine that a previously unpublished multi-piece Fatimid period inscription that records some verses of the Quran originally was in the Dome of the Rock.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