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.