Wadi Rum August 24-25

On Friday August 24 I went on an overnight trip to Wadi Rum with Joey Corbett, an ACOR fellow who is studying rock carvings and inscriptions in the Wadi Rum area of southern Jordan, and Firas Bqain, the new events administrator at the British Institute of Archaeology. We left in the morning and arrived at the Wadi Rum park in the late afternoon. I had not been to the park, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, since they started charging admission some years ago. We went to the Nabataean Temple and then to the spring, where I had not been before.

Joey Corbett at the spring with a Nabataean inscription at the far upper left

At sunset we went to a nearby site with an important rock covered with drawings and inscriptions.

Joey and Firas at the rock

A detail of the rock drawings and inscriptions

We spent the night at one of the tourist camps. The next morning Saturday August 25 we went to the Wadi Shirah north of Wadi Rum to see the Umayyad period open-air mosque there with an inscription there dated to Ramadan 107 AH/January 726 AD. Firas had written his MA thesis about the mosque and he wants to publish an article about it, so he and Joey needed to come to take some photographs. We found that the mosque had been badly vandalized recently.

Firas at the south qiblah wall of the open-air mosque

The Arabic inscription at the site dated to 107 AH/726 AD

We returned to Amman that afternoon, stopping at the Ottoman hajj fort at Wadi Hasa on the way back. The entrance was locked, so we could only walk around briefly.

The Ottoman hajj fort at Wadi Hasa