Jerusalem June 25-29

On June 25 I returned to Jerusalem. I traveled with Yorke Rowan and Morag Kersel, long-standing colleagues I first met at the Albright Institute years ago. We decided to cross at the north Shaykh Husayn bridge. That required an hour and a half taxi trip to the Jordanian side, a 45 minute wait for the shuttle bus across the bridge and over an hour on the Israeli side. We took a taxi to Beth Shean and then a bus to Jerusalem. We arrived after a seven-hour trip that cost about twice as much as a trip across the Allenby Bridge. That was the first time I had crossed the Shaykh Husayn bridge since the late 1990s.

I stayed at the New Palm Hostel near Damascus Gate. It is the lowest priced accommodations in Jerusalem that can be booked over the internet, and is a case where you get what you pay for. It was not possible to stay at the Albright Institute, where the renovation of the hostel building is in full swing.

A workman in one of the Institute windows

Room Three, where I spent three years and three and a half months between mid-December 1994 and the end of March 1998, which I think is the modern-day record for continuous residence in the hostel.

I came to Jerusalem this time to participate in a one-day conference about pilgrimage to Jerusalem that was held on Friday June 26 at the Swedish Studies Center, just inside Jaffa Gate and organized by George Hintlian. The conference was focused on Christian pilgrimage, although I gave a presentation about some general features of Muslim pilgrims in the Ottoman period.

On Sunday June 28 I went to the Islamic Museum on the al-Aqsa mosque compound to do some more work on the Arabic inscriptions with my colleague Khader Salameh. My pass from the Muslim waqf authorities to be on the compound had expired in April, and Khader had felt that the hassle involved in renewing the permission was not worth it for just one day, and so I had to enter through the tourist gate. The Israeli police officer who has been there since I started going to the compound in the mid-1990s immediately spotted me in the line and wanted to know why I did not have permission from the Muslim Waqf authorities. After some discussion, he finally let me on the compound after I explained that I was only going to the museum for one day. That same police officer had let me pass without ever any questions for years in the 1990s. That is just one indication how much more tightly the Israelis are now controlling and restricting access to the compound.

On Monday June 29 I went to Bethlehem to visit Iman Saca, an archaeological colleague whom I had not met for years. She is a Palestinian-American with a PhD in anthropology who is now teaching at St. Xavier University in Chicago. Her mother runs a Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem. Crossing through the checkpoint into and out of Bethlehem went quickly.

Iman Saca and her mother Maha at the Palestinian Heritage Center.

Later that evening I went to Ben Gurion airport, where I hung out for some hours, until my early morning flight to Frankfurt.

Amman May 26-June 24

On the morning of May 26 I crossed the Allenby Bridge back to Jordan. Once again at ACOR for several weeks, I spent much of my time working on Humayma reports and an article about Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman period that I will present at a conference in Jerusalem on June 26. I also prepared for the course I will teach at the University of Bamberg in the fall on the history and archaeology of Syria-Palestine from the 6th to 9th centuries.

The Humayma staff members were around until the end of May. John Oleson had noticed that a large number of sherds to be published did not have their color recorded. So I went to the Department of Antiquities store rooms, where I had not been before, to try to find the sherds in question; I was only able to locate a couple dozen of them.

On May 28 the second issue was released of the new Journal of Epigraphy and Rock Drawings that the Department of Antiquities publishes. It contains an article of mine about an Ottoman inscription in Jerusalem.

I spent most of my time at ACOR, although on June 2 I went with Dino Politis on a two-day trip to the Dead Sea. We met Sean Kingsley, a marine archaeologist from the UK, and we toured sites along the shore of the Dead Sea, including the Herodian site of Ayn Zara and the Ottoman fort at Haditha. We walked along the shore of the Dead Sea at the northern end of the Lisan peninsula and then went to Ghor al-Safi to see the new archaeological museum that Dino has been working to set up. The museum will be a wonderful facility, once it opens in a year or so.

We toured the Lot’s Cave site, where I had worked with Dino in earlier years, especially in 1994, and other sites in the Ghor al-Safi area.

Dino at the entrance to Lot’s Cave

Dino and Me in the apse of the church at Lot’s Cave

We went into the city of Ghor al-Safi and while Dino went to get a haircut, Sean and I took a cat nap in the car with the air conditioning on. That few minutes proved to be long enough to drain the car battery, so the car would not start. A friend of Dino was able to get the car started again eventually and we dropped Sean off at his hotel, before Dino and I returned to the Lot’s Cave dig house in Mazra‘a for the night. That may well be the last time that I will stay in the Mazra‘a dig house, where I have stayed off and on for twenty years. Once the Lot’s Cave Museum, with hostel facilities for dig teams, opens, Dino will shift his base of operations to there.

The next day we hiked up the lower stretch of a Roman road from the Dead Sea up to the Kerak plateau. After a couple of hour hike, we drove to Kerak and I got off at the bus station so that I could return to ACOR in time for an afternoon presentation about the new MEGA data base of archaeological sites in Jordan. A second evening lecture about Roman baths given by Robert Darby, currently one of the ACOR fellows, and a reception followed.

That talk about Roman baths was one of the usual round of public lectures on archaeology, but one talk I attended was on a completely different topic. Michael Gross, from the US, spoke about Catholic revival missions in mid-19th century Germany. That talk helped me to understand better what was involved in the Catholic-Protestant Kulturkampf in 19th century Germany.

I also went to see Adnan al-Bakhit, a historian at the University of Jordan, who heads a center for the history of Bilad al-Sham. We discussed the possibility of having the Bilad al-Sham committee publish my collection of translated German articles written in the late 19th and early 20th century about Palestinian culture. Meanwhile ACOR’s publication of my little Arabic for Archaeologists booklet remains stalled due to a computer formatting glitch that can not be resolved until Isabelle Rubin, who did the page layout, returns in a couple of months from a trip to the UK.

On June 20 I traveled to Aqaba and the following morning I finally was able to hand over the registered finds from my recent Humayma excavation season to the Department of Antiquities office. When I returned to Amman, I needed to stay in an inexpensive hotel, because ACOR was now full for a couple of months with a group of American college students studying Arabic. My final night in Amman on June 24 there was a big reception at the German archaeological institute.

Sinai and Jerusalem May 21-25

I had come to Aqaba in order to join a trip to Mount Sinai with some members of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem. I had not been to Mount Sinai before, and after a couple of planned trips that had fallen through, this trip was too good an opportunity to pass up.

So on the morning of May 21 I crossed over the border to Eilat and then went to the Taba border crossing to Egypt. I waited there for a couple of hours until the group arrived from Jerusalem. We crossed into Egypt and were met by an Egyptian tour guide. We stopped at a tourist spot in Nuweiba, before arriving at the St. Catherine’s rest house around sunset.

The next morning, May 22, we all left at 3:00 am to walk up Mount Sinai in time for sunrise; I would have been just as happy to do the walk in daylight. There were a couple hundred people on the summit at sunrise. Most were Christians of various diverse nationalities, as well as Muslims and Israeli Jews. Things were cool, making Mount Sinai a unique holy place where Christians, Muslims and Jews can all gather without the need for soldiers with machine guns standing guard.

Me at the summit

The group at the summit

The view from the summit

We were back at the rest house at 8:30. After a nap, I joined the group for a tour of St. Catherine’s monastery. It was Friday so the museum was closed, but we did get a tour of the library by one of the monks who is from the US; meeting him was a highlight of the trip. At noon we went to Nuweiba, where we checked into a beach resort. That afternoon, I swam in the ocean, played volleyball with the others and swam in the resort’s fresh water pool.

The group at the Nuweiba resort

One curious thing both at the St Catherine rest house and in the Nuweiba resort was that meals were included in the package deal, but drinks, including even water, had to be paid for separately. I had not come across that situation before where drinking water at meals is not part of an all-expenses paid package tour.

The next morning, May 23, I relaxed and swam in the pool some more. We checked out of the hotel at noon and traveled back to Taba, where we crossed the border to Eilat. We were met by a bus that took us to Jerusalem, arriving at 7:00 pm. I checked into the Jaffa Gate hostel, there being no available room at the Albright Institute.

May 24, Sunday, I went to services at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer and then in the afternoon I went to the Albright Institute, where I met my colleague Khader Salameh and others. That evening I joined the Albright fellows for a barbeque.

On May 25, I went to the Islamic Museum on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the morning, having to pass through the tourist entrance since my pass from the Aqwaf administration had expired. In the afternoon I went to the Albright Institute and then to the British Institute for a lecture about the famous British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon. Afterwards I went out with Steven Werlin, one of my Humayma staff members, and a friend of his, for extended conversation.

Amman May 6-20

Back in Amman on May 6 after the end of the Humayma excavation, I took the project staff out to dinner. Later that night Anja and Ilse flew back to Amsterdam, and the next morning Steven returned to the Albright Institute in Jerusalem.

I needed to spend a few days winding things up with the two-week project. One unexpected development concerned the landowner of part of the Humayma site where we did some of our work. Different parts of the site are owned by different local families and over the years they have wanted rent for allowing us to excavate, even though we are causing no damage to their property. In the 1998 season the issue of rent had escalated into a court case. A few years ago the Department of Antiquities purchased the site, so I was happy knowing that the landowners no longer had any claim to collect rent. The landlord came by the second day and I brushed him off. He did not come back during the rest of our two weeks at the site, and I assumed that the issue was closed, or so I thought. It turns out that the Department only intends to buy the site, but has not yet done so. In the meantime the landlord wrote a letter to the director of the Department of Antiquities putting in a claim for 400 dinars = 550 US dollars, an amount that was about twenty percent of my total excavation budget.

I first heard about this claim once I was back in Amman. After considerable discussion with people at the Department of Antiquities, I got the landowner to drop his claim, although I was expected to pay him some lesser amount when I next visited the site.

Around at ACOR for the month were John Oleson, the director of the Humayma excavations in past years, Barbara Reeves, who has taken over direction of the Humayma project, and some other members of the Humayma project. They were around to process pottery and other finds from previous seasons of excavation and work on the final reports.

On the 19th I went with the Humayma members for a tour of the new national museum in downtown Amman, currently under construction. The tour was given by Khairieh Amr, a colleague of long-standing and former member of the Humayma project.

On the 20th I went with John Oleson and Barbara Reeves to visit the site of Humayma. We visited two weeks after the end of my project, and we noticed in the reliquary church that in the meantime someone had dug a new big pit around where the reliquary had been in the hopes of finding something of value.

Me next to the new pit where the reliquary had once been

While at the site, I had a long conversation with the landowner and we settled on a payment of 50 dinars = 70 US dollars, still a stiff price, but much better than the 400 dinars he originally wanted.

After touring the site, we visited some of our workmen at their tent a few kilometers north of the site. Then we went to Quwayra, where John and Barbara dropped me off. They returned to Amman, while I took a bus to Aqaba, where I checked into a hotel for the night, before heading off the next day for a quick trip to Mount Sinai.

One objective of my going to Aqaba had been to hand over the handful of registered finds from my Humayma excavation to the Department of Antiquities office in Aqaba, but the person in charge of the museum was in Amman, so I will have to make that delivery on some future trip to Aqaba.

During my days at ACOR, in addition to working on Humayma reports, I did the final polishing of the various German articles about Palestinian folk culture written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I had been translating over the course of the past year, and translated another one. I got caught up on some academic reading and attended public lectures about archaeology, about one a week.

Humayma April 21-May 6 Part Four

We excavated at Humayma for only two short weeks, so we needed to bottom out onto sterile soil in each of our trenches within a few days in order to finish everything. So we chose to excavate small-sized squares of 2 x 2 meter or smaller. But once excavation had proceeded down beyond a depth of a meter or so, it became progressively difficult to get in and out of the small squares. In one of Steve’s squares the unexpected appearance of an early-phase wall reduced the amount of space to move around in to a small wedge.

Steve in his square

Anja and Ilse in their square

We back-filled each of our squares after we finished. We would put some modern artifacts at the bottom of the trenches to let any archaeologists working here in the future know clearly that the soil here had already been dug up. Anja and Ilse had both participated in an excavation in Iran a year ago, so they had an Iranian coin to put at the bottom of their trench, which will puzzle some future excavator.

The big find of the season was the intact reliquary in one of the churches. It had survived undisturbed by the recent illicit digging on all sides of it. The reliquary stone was badly cracked, so we had to remove it with care in order to keep it from breaking up. Wrapping it up with duct tape did the trick.

Moving the reliquary

The day we removed the reliquary a sandstorm hit that was so strong that we had stop work early. The next day I discovered to my chagrin that so much sand had gotten into my camera lens so that it no longer worked properly. Fortunately that was at the end of the season, so my camera malfunctioning was not a big problem.

A general view of one of the churches taken with my now defective camera.

One other interesting thing we did was to make a video of each of the excavators explaining the results of their trenches. The videos were taken with Steven's video camera. Unfortunately the sound quality left much to be desired. But having the excavators explain their trenches is such a good idea, that it would be worth doing with a higher quality video camera.

Humayma April 21-May 6 Part Three

During the two weeks of the excavation at Humayma, we would return to Quwayra in the mid- afternoon. Sometimes we would stay put and do notebook work. One evening we played the card game Hearts, which I had not played for years. I won, in part because I was the only one not drinking any alcohol. Another evening I ate a whole watermelon as a challenge.

Me and the watermelon

But other times we did something special in the afternoon or evening. The first day, we went to Aqaba, about a 45 minute drive south of Quwayra. We did some shopping for supplies and food, and had pizza dinner with Ghassan Nasser, an old friend of Isabelle and mine, who is currently working in Aqaba. We visited Aqaba a second time on Isabelle’s birthday. We spent some time on the beach and then visited Ghassan again. Ghassan had found a plastic Spiderman figure and cake with which to celebrate. We also took advantage of Ghassan having internet access, since there is no internet outlet in Quwayra.

Ghassan, Isabelle and Spiderman

Our landlord was helpful and friendly. One other afternoon he took us for a trip to the east of Quwayra, where we saw some scenic rock formations and rock bridges. The entire region is very scenic; the Wadi Rum nature preserve is nearby.

A rock bridge

Haroun, our department representative, and Saleh, our landlord

We worked at the site for such a short time that we took only one full day off during the two weeks. On that day some of the workmen took us for a hike and cooked a picnic barbeque of chicken in a scenic area overlooking the Wadi Araba to the west of the site.

The landscape, including a herd of sheep and goats

Steven making a sand angel

The picnic

The town of Quwayra, where we stayed, is the largest town in the area of southern Jordan, between the port of Aqaba and Ma‘an to the north. It has little to offer of interest, beyond the scenery and the ruins of an Ottoman fort. One day we met an American Peace Corp volunteer who was there to offer English classes.

Quwayra as seen from the roof of our apartment building

The Ottoman fort at Quwayra

I hired a local lady to cook supper for us, but her meals were uninspiring and we gave up on her services by the end. The one sour note of the project was when our cook’s husband presented me with a bloated bill for the food purchases he had made for our meals. I challenged his bill, which provoked an unpleasant incident, just as we were leaving for Amman.

Humayma April 21 to May 6 Part Two

The Humayma excavation continued for 13 days in the field. What follows is a short summary of the project that will appear in the 2009 volume of Munjazat, a journal published by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.

Humayma
Project Name: The 2009 Season of Archaeological Excavations at Humayma
Duration: April 22 – May 5, 2009
Sponsor: University of Victoria
Director: Robert Schick
Representative: Haroun al-Amarat

The short two-week season of archaeological excavations at the site of Humayma focused on three of the five known Byzantine period churches at the site.

Three probes were dug in the C101 Lower Church in the west center of the site, which had been extensively excavated in the 1991, 1992 and 1993 seasons, to answer specific questions about architectural phasing. The first probe was dug in the north side apse below the pavement level in recently disturbed soil down 2 meters to sterile soil in order to determine whether the north side apse and the central apse bonded or abutted. The three wall courses and further foundation courses exposed below the pavement level bonded, confirming that the north side apse and the central apse were constructed at the same time, rather than belonging to different building phases.

A second probe was dug outside the southeast corner of the C101 church in order to investigate the phasing of the east wall of the church and a wall line running to the east from its southeast corner. The probe dug down 2 meters to sterile soil exposed the foundation courses of the east church wall and the wall running east, and showed that the two walls bonded. But the probe also uncovered a new wall with two courses of blocks and four foundation courses and an associated plaster floor running east-west but not aligned with the other walls. This new wall clearly belonged to a pre-church phase building, the first definite evidence that there had been a pre-existing structure at the site before the church was built. The western portion of this pre-church wall had been removed during the construction of the east wall of the church (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. The probe outside the southeast corner of the C101 church, showing the pre-church wall

A third probe was dug outside the southwest corner of the C101 church in order to understand better the relative architectural phasing of the church and the row of rooms to its south. The probe dug almost 2 meters to sterile soil uncovered dump layers filled with pottery and animal bones from the Nabatean period that were later cut through for the foundation courses of the west wall of the westernmost room in the row south of the church and the later foundation courses of the south wall of the church. The excavation shows that the row of rooms along the south side of the church predated the construction of the church; their common north wall was partially cut into for the construction of the south wall of the church, leaving no clear face for the south wall of the church or the north face of the north wall of the south row of rooms.

The C119 Upper Church, on a hill sloping up to the west in the far west area of the site, was a small single-apsed basilica, with side rooms flanking the apse to the north and south. Only a few days of excavation had been carried out there during the 1993 season. But recent illicit digging had churned up a great deal of soil in the church, exposing some of the architectural features of the church. That enabled us to document the architectural features of with minimal effort.

The recently churned-up soil was removed in the northeast area of the church down to the northern portion of the elevated chancel area and portions of the pavement in the north aisle and nave west of the chancel. The elevated chancel consisted of a step up and a row of blocks that would have once supported chancel screen panels; only a couple of small fragments of the marble panels were found. The pavement within the chancel area, as well as the nave and north aisle, consisted of sandstone pavers. The two free-standing arch piers in the north E-W row were also exposed (Fig. 2). Excavation along the west wall of the church exposed a doorway in the center, leading to uninvestigated rooms farther to the west. The floor of the church interior here consisted of leveled bedrock.

Fig. 2. General view of the C119 church

The eastern portion of the B126 Church, in the east center of the site, had been built over in the 1960s by a building used as a barn and was the target of only a couple of days of work in the 1996 season. Recently the thatched roof of the modern building had been removed, making it easier to work in the interior and document the architectural features of the church. The modern barn deposits were removed down to the original flagstone pavement, which was partially preserved in the apse and to its west (Fig. 3). One of the intact pavers in front of the apse covered an undisturbed, but empty, stone reliquary (Fig. 4). A stone slab bearing a Latin inscription with 13 preserved letters was also found out of place on top of the flagstone pavers in the apse. Excavation below the pavement level to the south of the apse confirmed that most of the extant walls other than the apse itself belong to the 1960s building.

Fig. 3. General view of the B126 church

Fig. 4. The reliquary

Humayma April 21-May 6 Part One

On Tuesday April 21 I left Amman to start my two-week excavation season at Humayma, in the southern part of Jordan. Isabelle Rubin and I drove down to the town of Quwayra, where I had rented an apartment for the month. Anja Heidenreich and Ilse Sturkenboom had spent the past few days in Aqaba, so they came to Quwayra by bus, joined by the fifth staff member, Steven Werlin, currently a fellow at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, who traveled to Eilat that morning and crossed over to Aqaba. Everybody arrived in Quwayra by late afternoon and we got settled in. That evening we were joined by Haroun Amarat, our representative from the Department of Antiquities office in Wadi Musa/Petra.

The next day, Wednesday April 22 was the first day of excavation at the site of Humayma, about a twenty-minute drive from Quwayra. Our dig vehicle seated five people comfortably. Unfortunately there were six of us, so Anja and Ilse had to squish into the front seat, which was okay for the short distance to the site.

The dig vehicle in front of our apartment building in Quwayra.

Our daily schedule was to leave for the site around 7:00 am, arriving around 7:30. We would take a break around 10:30 to 11:00 and then work until 2:00, returning to Quwayra around 2:30 pm.

I hired five local workmen.

Me in a dance line with the five local workmen

Hiring workmen has always been a hassle at Humayma, because there are a number of different bedouin families who live in the area who expect some of their family members to be hired. We would have preferred to hire workmen from only one family who live in a bedouin tent a few kilometers from the site, but as one person from another family who lives at the site told me, if I did not hire him and another member of his family there would be “trouble”. Hiring them worked out okay, although in general the bedouin workmen here are the least productive workmen I have ever had. I paid them a typical wage of 6 Jordanian dinars = 8.50 US dollars per day.

The group photograph of the staff and workmen

The workmen had a tea fire going much of the day, and for the 10:30-11:00 break they also cooked a substantial meal of tomato stew and eggs, along with the local variety of thin bread, supplemented by the yogurt, sardines, melon and the inevitable tomatoes and cucumbers that we would bring.

The mid-morning meal

A couple of the workmen spoke halting English, because they earn much of their living from tourists. But the other workmen spoke only a little English. Isabelle has been living in Jordan for many years and so her colloquial Arabic is very good; she often knew every-day colloquial words that I did not know.

On the last day, one of the workmen brought his camel, so we all took turns getting on. I have been on a camel only a few times, and only once for any distance.

Me on the camel

Amman April 11-20

Once again in Amman, I spent my time making arrangements for my upcoming two-week excavation season at Humayma and traveling around the country to visit sites that I had not been to for years. I also bought a new lap top computer to replace my old one that had died recently.

It proved remarkably easy to make the arrangements for my upcoming excavation. I needed to make a couple of trips to the Department of Antiquities to get my excavation permit, which the director has the habit of not issuing more than a couple of days before the start of a project. But otherwise things went smoothly. One of the members of the dig team is Isabelle Rubin, a free-lance archaeologist who has lived in Jordan for years. She was a big help in making arrangements. Two other members of the dig team also arrived in Jordan to spend some time touring before the start of the excavation. They are Ilse Sturkenboom and Anja Heidenreich, both connected with the University of Bamberg in Germany.

On April 14 I went with Isabelle, Ilse and Anja on a trip to visit the site of Humayma and find an apartment to rent for the two week season; we took a load of dig equipment along with us. We traveled along the Dead Sea-Araba highway and stopped for lunch near Feinan.

Isabelle, Anja and Ilse at our picnic spot near Feinan.

We then continued along the scenic road up to Petra, which I had not been on since 1993, before it was nicely paved. We continued to Quwayra, where we met the landlord of an apartment building that Isabelle knew about, and I decided to rent an apartment there. We then stopped by the site of Humayma to see the current state of the area where we will soon be excavating. I did some of the driving back to Amman. It was the first time I had driven a manual transmission vehicle in years, but the trip passed without incident.

The next day, April 15, I began a few days of travel around the country to visit sites. I went with Zdravki Dimitrov, one of the current ACOR fellows, to visit some sites in the south part of Amman, first to Quwaysma to see the location of the Byzantine period church that I had excavated in 1989; the church was demolished shortly thereafter so that the landowner could built a modern house on the spot, so nothing remains of the church.

The house where the Quwaysma church used to be before 1989

We also went to find the second upper church at Quwaysma, only to discover that it too was almost totally destroyed by recent construction. We then went to the rock-cut tomb on the south side of Amman, where Muslim tradition locates the Cave of the People of the Cave, mentioned in the Quran. We then went to find the Byzantine church in Swafieh; I had never figured out before where it was located exactly. We found the modern shelter built over the church, but it was locked; we would have needed to make arrangements with someone from the Department of Antiquities to visit it.

On April 16 I visited more sites south of Amman with Zdravki and Robert Darby, another of the current ACOR fellows. We wanted to visit Qasr al-Tuba, one of the Umayyad desert palaces, but we were unable to locate it. It turns out that it is off the paved road, some distance from where we thought it was. We did get to two other Umayyad desert palaces, however: Khan al-Zabib and Qastal; a lot of work has been done at Qastal since I was last there. Qastal has what may be the earliest preserved minaret tower.

The minaret tower at Qastal

On April 17 I did more traveling, this time with Susan Graham, one of the fellows at the Albright Institute. I went to meet her at the Jordanian side of the Allenby Bridge and we went to the nearby site where tradition has it Jesus was baptised. The Jordanians have been developing the site extensively for religious tourism, but it is remarkably unimpressive.

The baptism site

In the afternoon we went to Jerash, where Susan was especially interested in the Byzantine period churches. Burton MacDonald, a long-time colleague, joined us. The mosaic floor in the Bishop Isaiah church was recently uncovered. I had not seen it exposed before, so I took a lot of photographs of the floor with its examples of the curious deliberate damage to the images of animals and people.

An example of the deliberate damage to an image in the mosaic floor of the Bishop Isaiah church

On April 18 I did more traveling with Susan Graham to visit sites with Byzantine churches in the northern part of the country. We went to Umm al-Jimal, where I had worked in 1984.

The Numerianos Church at Umm al-Jimal where I had worked in 1984

We then went to Umm al-Surab, Sama and Mafraq. We continued on to Hayyan al-Mushrif and then Rihab, Khirbat al-Samra and Yajuz, seeing in the course of the day more Byzantine churches than you could shake your fist at. I was disappointed to see how many churches the Department of Antiquities has thoughtlessly cleared in recent years.

Susan Graham at the baptistery of one of the churches at Hayyan al-Mushrif

On April 19 Susan returned to Jerusalem and I then spent my time making arrangements for the upcoming excavation.

Jerusalem March 17-April 11

Back at the Albright Institute after my recent travels, I continued to work on the Arabic inscriptions in the Islamic Museum. My six month national Endowment for the Humanities fellowship nominally ended on March 31, but I stayed on at the Albright for another ten days. My colleague, Khader Salameh, and I have finished a draft of the corpus entries and we are working on the second draft currently. But it will take a few more months to finish the entire manuscript for publication.

This period was loaded with public lectures that I attended, including two by Gideon Avni on Churches to Mosques in the Negev and From Polis to Medina, and others by Israel Finkelstein on Jerusalem in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, Susan Graham on Jews and Christians in Byzantine Jerusalem, Judith Mackenzie about the Art and Architecture of Alexandria and Tzvika Tzuk on Water Systems. I myself gave a presentation at Hebrew University on Muslim Uses of the al-Aqsa Mosque Compound in Jerusalem as the weekly guest lecturer for a course on Places of Worship: Temples, Synagogues, Churches and Mosques.

Also during this stint in Jerusalem my laptop computer died. It was on its last legs and I had been intending to buy a new laptop when I was next in Jordan, but unfortunately it did not last quite long enough. Something was wrong with the power supply unit that would cost too much to repair.

I also attended a Lenten Wednesday church potluck with the members of the Lutheran Chruch of the Redeemer and took part in the Palm Sunday procession from Bethphage to the Old City, followed by another church potluck. I had taken part in the Palm Sunday procession several times before in the 1990s.

The Palm Sunday Procession heading into Lion’s Gate

I did some sight-seeing in Jerusalem as well. On April 6, the Armenian scholar George Hintlian took some of the Albright fellows to the Byzantine period Armenian monastery with mosaics in the Russian compound on the Mount of Olives and then a second Armenian church with mosaics near Damascus Gate, neither of which I had been to before. Two days later he took us back to see another Armenian church mosaic on the Mount of Olives Russian compound.

George Hintlian and one of the Armenian mosaic floors on the Mount of Olives

Detail of the Armenian mosaic floor near Damascus Gate

On April 9 I went with Susan Graham, one of the current fellows at the Albright Institute to see the rock-cut Hellenistic rock-cut tombs in the Kidron Valley and then the Silwan area.

Susan Graham at one of the tombs in the Kidron Valley

In this period I also met Muhammad Ghosheh to continue work on our English version of his Arabic book about the al-Aqsa Mosque.

On Saturday April 11, I left Jerusalem for Amman, Jordan, where I will spend the next couple of months.

Kuwait and Amman March 14-17

On Saturday March 14 I took an early morning flight from Mumbai back to Amman, Jordan, with an eight-hour lay-over in Kuwait. The ticket was about 25 percent cheaper than the alternatives. I had thought of ambitious plans to go into Kuwait City for a few hours, but I ended up taking advantage of the free hotel room I received instead to get caught up on sleep and emails, so my Kuwait adventure did not even get me out of the airport. The flight was otherwise routine.

Back in Amman, I spent Saturday March 15 at ACOR. I was glad to have the chance to meet and chat with Dino Politis and Isabelle Rubin, archaeology colleagues of long-standing. I reviewed with Isabelle the latest version of the Arabic for Archaeologists booklet that I have produced.

On Sunday, March 16 I joined a group of fellows from the Albright Institute in Jerusalem who had come the previous day to start a five-day tour of Jordan. I showed them around sites to the south of Amman: Nitl, Umm al-Rasas, Lehun, Dhiban, Madaba and Mount Nebo, most of them with major phases of occupation in the Byzantine and early Islamic periods. I had not been to some of those sites in over ten years. Umm al-Rasas, where I worked in 1987-1989, is now a UNESCO world heritage site and a new visitors center has been constructed recently, although it is not open yet. A new shelter has also been constructed over the Church of St Stephen complex, the most important part of the site with its 8th-century mosaics.

The Visitor Center at Umm al-Rasas

The shelter over the Church of St Stephen

That evening we attended a lecture at the Friends of Archaeology center on a Chalcolithic period excavation. The next day on Monday March 17 I returned to Jerusalem. Crossing the Allenby Bridge took an extraordinay seven hours, in part because the Israelis took a long time before deciding to let me into the country; four hours is a more typical crossing time.

That brought to an end my current round of travel.

Hyderabad and Mumbai March 10-13

My flight arrived in Hyderabad in the morning of Tuesday the 10th on schedule. It was a public holiday for the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, so the Henry Martyn Institute and many businesses in general were closed for the day. I went into the city and met Timothy Marthand, the concert pianist, with whom I had stayed during my previous trip to Hyderabad last September. I felt a bit under the weather, so I took it easy and spent much of the following day, Wednesday the 11th, watching movies on my computer at Timothy’s place.

On Thursday the 12th, I got a ride to the HMI campus with Christy Femila, a former MTh student at Luther Seminary in St Paul. Minnesota who is now the academic program coordinator. It was her turn to lead the daily morning devotion, and most amazingly none of the other staff members showed up, except for three of the cleaning ladies and three staff who came at the tail end. Attendance at morning devotions is a mandatory part of the work day, but the new HMI director was away on travels and the institute administrator was also away from the office that day, so when the cat’s away the mice will play. People were predicting full attendance the next day, when the director would be back in town. In general anarchy prevailed in the office that day, with few people actually doing much of any work. As I discussed over lunch with some short term visitors from Germany, the lack of attendance and lack of work commitment reflects the lack of interest that many of the staff members actually have in the institute’s ethos and goals of interfaith reconciliation, which is sad.

I had a good conversation with Qadeer Khwaja, a local Hyderabadi Muslim who has rejoined the HMI faculty after having left to finish his PhD. His joining the Islamic studies faculty is a major bit of good news for the institute, whose academic programs had been struggling since I left in mid-2006. I gave a presentation about the Muslim interest in Jerusalem to the students in the Islamic Studies program. The HMI campus is as lovely as ever.

Qadeer Khwaja and me at his desk

The HMI campus

Last September Timothy had talked me into buying his used iPhone, which turned out to be an excellent investment, and this time around I purchased his used Canon digital SLR camera. I had been thinking to upgrade anyway from my pocket digital camera.

On Friday I took a morning flight to Mumbai and spent the afternoon at the centre of the Ismaili Tariqah and Religious Education Board. This centre of the Nizari Khoja Ismailis (followers of the Agha Khan) had twice sent their student trainees to the Henry Martyn Institute for courses in Islamic Studies in 2000 and 2005. Teaching these groups of highly motivated Muslim students about Islam was among the most enjoyable teaching experiences I have had, and I have stayed in touch with a number of them, some of whom continue to work at the Mumbai centre. I had a long chat with Hussain Jasani, the institute director, and that evening had dinner with Khairunnissa Lakhani, one of the 2005 participants, and her husband.

Some of the ITREB participants in the 2005 HMI programme and me

Khairunnissa Lakhani at her desk