Oxford and London April 22-28

At the end of April I traveled to the UK to attend a conference at Oxford University. There had been considerable uncertainty about whether I would be able to travel or whether the conference would have to be rescheduled due to the disruptions in airline travel caused by the eruption of the volcano in Iceland. But as it happened I was able to fly as scheduled on the morning of Thursday April 22 on the first BMI flight from Amman to Heathrow since the start of the Iceland volcano problem. The flight was uneventful and there were even a few empty seats on the plane.

I arrived in Heathrow in the early afternoon and spent that night in a hotel near the airport. The next morning, Friday April 23, I took a bus to Oxford and got settled into my room in Keble College.

Keble College. My room was towards the left.

That afternoon I went to the Ashmolean Museum and later met Nisha Keshwani, currently a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Oxford University. She had been a student at the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad during the 2006-2007 academic year. That was just after I had left, so I had not met her before. That evening I met the conference participants in a local pub.

Nisha Keshwani and me

Saturday April 24 was the one-day conference on religious conversion in Late Antiquity, sponsored by the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity. I gave my presentation about “A Christian City with a Major Muslim Shrine: Jerusalem in the Umayyad Period”. After the conference we all went to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner.

The following day, Sunday April 25, I went to the Natural History and Pitt Rivers Museums in the morning and then met Konstantin Klein, a graduate student at Oxford who is studying Jerusalem in the Fifth Century; I had first met him in 2007 when he was a student at the University of Bamberg. Later that afternoon David Singh picked me up and took me to his home in a neighboring town, where I met his wife and daughter. David, who is now employed at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, was a former faculty member at the Henry Martyn Institute.

David Singh and his wife

On the morning of Monday, April 26 I took a bus from Oxford to London and checked into a hotel near Paddington Station. In the afternoon, I went to the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, all in just over three hours. That was my most spectacular achievement in museum visiting since 2001, when I managed to see five museums in Munich within three hours. In the evening I met Rebecca Foote for dinner at an Indian restaurant near Euston Square. Rebecca has been a member of the Humayma excavations over the years, focusing her attention on the Abbasid family palace, and she is currently in London working to produce some of the volumes of the Khalili collection of Islamic art.

The next day, Tuesday April 27, I met Dino Politis, of Lot’s Cave excavation fame, at the British Museum; I had last been there in the mid-1990s. He showed me around the museum, before we went to the office of the Palestine Exploration Fund, where I browsed in the library for a while. That afternoon I went to the Institute of Ismaili Studies, near the University of London, to meet some Indian Ismaili students from the ITREB Centre in Mumbai who had been students of mine in a three-week program in 2005 at the Henry Martyn Institute. After attending a lecture at the Institute, I met four of the students, who are currently in graduate programs at the Institute and the University of London Institute of Education.

The Ismaili students and me

On Wednesday April 28, in the morning I walked around Hyde Park and St. James Park, before heading to Heathrow for my afternoon flight back to Amman. During my stay in the UK, most of the days had beautiful sunny weather, continuing my track record of only rarely experiencing rain during my stays in the UK.

Flowers in St James Park

Amman April 1-21

I spent the first part of April in Amman, continuing my fellowship at the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) to help Ghazi Bisheh write the final report of his excavations in 1993-1994 at the Burnt Palace in Madaba.

Things were looking up for the project this month. Ghazi was able to locate his monthly and quarterly reports, and I found some additional records, so we have enough information now to produce the report. We also retrieved the pottery from the project from the Department of Antiquities storerooms. Emma Morse, an American studying Arabic at the University of Jordan, also started helping out as a volunteer for a few hours each week.

My Palestinian Customs book was published by the University of Jordan Press in early April, only a couple of weeks after I had submitted the final camera-ready copy. I got my author’s copies on April 6, although copies are not yet available for sale.

The cover of my Palestinian Customs book

I also worked on my article about Jerusalem in the Umayyad period for the upcoming conference at Oxford University on religious conversion in Late Antiquity and I polished my translation of a 19th-century German article about Jerusalem.

On April 5 I went with Chris Tuttle, the Associate Director of ACOR, Tali Ginni, from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, and Ben Anderson, currently a fellow at ACOR, on a day trip to Petra. We went see to the Petra Church and then spend a long time at the Temple of the Winged Lions, before having lunch with the German excavation team currently in Petra. Later in the afternoon we dropped Tali off at the Aqaba-Eilat border crossing, before returning to ACOR later that night. That was the first time I had been to Petra since 2004.

Chris and Tali at the Temple of the Winged Lions

Among other scholarly activities, on April 8 I met Raouf Abujaber in his downtown office. He is interested in the Ottoman period history of Jordan and I presented him with a copy of my Palestinian Customs book. On April 14 I attended a lecture at ACOR by Franklin Price about nautical archaeology, which was followed by a reception and on April 18 I attended the lecture at the Columbia Center by Hazem Malhas on the environment; he is the newly appointed Minister of the Environment. On April 21 I attended the all-day Science Day archaeology conference at the University of Jordan.

On Friday April 16 I went to Jerash with Ivana Kvetanova, an ACOR fellow from Slovakia who is interested in early Christianity. We walked all around, especially seeing all the Byzantine churches, including the Church of Peter and Paul in the east part of the city, which I had not seen before.

Amoing other activities, on April 7 I invited Mira D’Souza for lunch at ACOR. She is an undergraduate at Drexel University currently studying Arabic at the University of Jordan. Mira is the daughter of Andreas and Diane D’Souza, the former directors of the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad, where I worked between 2000 and 2006. I met Mira again on April 12 for the flamenco dance performance by Rocio Molina. On April 10 I went to see the recently-released Pakistani movie with a serious theme, Khuda Ki Liye (For the Sake of God) at the Royal Cultural Centre.

Amman March 1-31

I spent the month of March in Amman, at the start of my six-month fellowship at the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR).

I am here to help a Jordanian archaeologist, Ghazi Bisheh, write the final report of his excavations in 1993-1994 at the Burnt Palace in Madaba. His year-long excavation of a Byzantine and Early Islamic period palatial building was an ACOR-US Agency for International Development project to promote the tourist development of Madaba, but regrettably almost nothing was ever published about the excavations. I am the first recipient of ACOR’s new publications fellowship, intended to support publication of old excavation projects, especially ACOR-sponsored ones.

So I spent a number of days sorting through files of the project at ACOR, and searching for things stored in various nooks and crannies of ACOR that I had not been in before. Unfortunately, Ghazi has not able to locate his field notes, plans and summary reports, although he had not yet looked everywhere in his home. We did, however, locate the pottery from his excavation. Ghazi and I went out one day to the Department of Antiquities storeroom to identify the several crates of pottery in storage there, but we need to receive formal permission from the Department to bring the pottery to ACOR. Samer Shraideh, the person who had inked all of the drawings for the project, came to ACOR one day to go over his materials with me. Tom Dailey, the USAID person back in the early 1990s, also happened to pass through ACOR for a couple of days.

Ghazi sorting through the pottery in the storeroom

In the meantime I translated into English an article in Italian that the Franciscan archaeologist Michele Piccirillo had written about his own excavations at the Burnt Palace.

With work on the Madaba Burnt Palace publication temporarily stymied, I was able to work on other projects. I finished the final proofreading and indexing of my Palestinian Customs book that the Bilad al-Sham History Committee of the University of Jordan will be publishing; Dr. Adnan Bakhit heads the committee. I submitted the final camera-ready copy on March 22. I also started writing my article about the Islamization of Jerusalem in the early Islamic period for presentation at a conference at Oxford University at the end of April. I did another round of editing of Khader’s long article about the renovations of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II in Jerusalem in the early 19th century, before sending it back to him for further comment and I also proofread the upcoming issue of Near Eastern Archaeology.

I also did some English editing of articles for the University of Jordan’s Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology, which Dr. Bakhit edits. I was scarcely in the country for 24 hours before he called me up to do the editing – mostly of the English abstracts for articles in Arabic. This time around I have an official letter from the university president authorizing me a payment of 1 dinar ($1.40) per page that I copyedit.

On Monday March 16 I gave a public lecture at ACOR about Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman Period, followed by a reception. My presentation, which focused on the pilgrimage account of two Moroccan pilgrims from the late 18th and early 20th centuries was well received. I also attended a number of lectures given by fellows at ACOR and at the Friends of Archaeology Society.

Dino Politis was in the country with a small group to work on the pottery from his recent excavations in Ghor al-Safi. I was able to chat with him in Amman, as well as his colleague Chris Entwhistle from the British Museum, whom I had last met when I was working with Dino at the Lot’s Cave excavations in 1994. Another person who passed through ACOR with a group of students was Warren Schultz, who was in graduate school at the University of Chicago when I was there. At the end of the month Tali Gini, who works in the Negev for the Israel Antiquities Authority, came to ACOR for some ten days to sort through records from the Temple of the Winged Lions in Petra, and I had plenty of occasions to chat with her.

On Sunday March 14 I went with a group of ACOR fellows to Yarmouk University in Irbid to attend a reception introducing new faculty members in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. Afterwards we got a tour of their laboratories.

On Friday March 19 Ghazi and I were invited by Othman and Enaya Malhas to their home in Anjara, near Ajlun for a lunch gathering. Othman is a retired mathematics professor who is building a conference center in one part of his country estate. Othman is a fan of the Roman mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa (modern-day Jerash). Most of the other guests were members of the extended family, including Hazem Malhas, whom I have met on and off over the years, including once in Hyderabad. Hazem recently became the minister for the environment.

On Friday March 26 I went to Madaba for the day. I had been in Madaba a year ago with some people from the Albright Institute, but it had been some years since I had walked around the city to see all of the scattered antiquities. It being Friday, the specific area of the Burnt Palace was closed, but I could see it from a distance.

The Shelter over the Burnt Palace