Bosra

What happened to October? I have been remiss on blogging so hope to remedy that over the next couple of days with updates. First we'll start with my trip to Syria.

This was timed to match 3 events: Pierre-Marie Blanc, an old friend who I never manage to be in the same country as, was coming back to Syria from France for 3 weeks to study his pottery from excavations in Bosra. He is, after many years based in Damascus with IFPO/CNRS, back in La Belle France with his family and in charge of the Hellenistic and Roman Levant for the French archaeology people (I confess I'm a bit confused about the French system, but they have this wonderful CNRS which seems to employ hundreds of archaeologists, so clearly the French think archaeology is science);

(Pierre-Marie, seated, talking to his oldest friend in Bosra, Suleiman, at S's little shop/cafe)

Through Stephen Bourke I had a contact with Bettina Fischer-Genz who is leading part of the German team working at Baalbek, and they were in the field in early October, and to extend a visa to stay in Jordan beyond one month I needed to either get a blood test done or leave for at least 24 hours.
So then came the normal comedy of establishing how to get to Bosra from Amman by public transport. When I went to Abdali to ask the service (shared taxi/sedan driving between fixed destinations) drivers, who normally drive between Amman and Damascus, they all said, "oh there is no service, you must come with me in my special car for the special price of .... [insert here some ridiculous sum of money]". So I got Feras to go down there with me, and he got the same answer first time. So I told him I'd sit in the car and he should go and ask for himself. Aha. Easy. Service to border, get taxi for about $10 from border to Bosra (outrageous - works out at the same price to drive for 20 minutes from border to Bosra, as for 2 hours from Amman to Damascus, but that is Syria). So I headed off next morning, my service driver kindly drove around at the border to find a taxi for me to Bosra and agreed I'd pay 500 syrian pounds + 1 JD, then after some issues (Syrian taxi driver picked up another guy without asking me, and then said, it's OK, you can pay just 500 SP, the other guy will pay 200SP - for the same distance !! ) I got to Bosra.

Pierre-Marie told me to just ask for Boutros, which is Arabic for Peter, and it worked. The French, who all like to live well, have a deal with the local restaurant for lunch and dinner:




(main square outside theatre/citadel, and gate into "our" restaurant left, interior of restaurant above)


The dig house is on top of the mediaeval citadel which was built around and in the Roman theatre. This protected the theatre which is the most intact in the Empire.

On this photo (below) you can see above, and a bit behind the scenae frons (stage facade) a series of round roofed rooms, with a bit of a verandah - that's the dig house [don't forget you can always get a bigger version of photos if you double click on them].



Getting up there is tricky - the stairs inside the tower are as steep as a very very long ladder,



















(the rooms and bathrooms are built into these Ottoman fortified rooms, which makes the second bathroom a challenge).

my room in the dig house, note original tiles on floor

The view is wonderful over old Bosra.

I expect a few surprised tourists got unexpected views of me and Pierre-Marie munching on our breakfast bread and jam and drinking milky French breakfast coffee in our pj's on the dig house terrace, but heh, what do I care? Lucky I took respectable jamies.

I spent a couple of days wandering around Bosra, which has an ancient tell (Bronze and Iron Age which hasn't been very much investigated), significant Nabatean occupation,
and then it became the Roman period capital of the province of Arabia.
There is quite a bit of evidence for reusing and resizing buildings:

(The baths {and many other structures} had been used as housing until very recently, when the Syrians booted out all the families without influence, and then have left the buildings to disintegrate ... sigh.)









The EU sponsored reconstruction of the dome of one set of baths (not the biggest, but the best preserved with a nice sequence of expansion during the Roman period, and then Abbasid period reuse as industrial areas) was halted once the European engineer came out and saw the Syrian interpretation of his scaffolding construction plans. Where he had had posts of a certain dimension to hold up 10 tonnes, the Syrians had decided posts one quarter the size would be fine. What could possibly go wrong?

I collected quite a few images of ancient game boards carved into the stones of the theatre, and often reused in the castle.















I should mention here, that the Syrians ride bikes a lot, and zillions of cheap Chinese motorbikes - saw one family of 5 on a motorbike!!



There are some important early Islamic mosques, schools and baths.

(this is the narrowed down Roman street with the very early al-Omari mosque on the left, and the Hammam Manjak (Islamic baths) across the street. The mosque was founded by the Caliph Umar, conqueror (or Opener, depending on your view) of Syria, and may have been the first mosque founded after the death of the Prophet. I didn't get to go inside - no time - but it looked interesting mainly because it was full of people; mosques are like community halls crossed with youth clubs crossed with railway waiting rooms)











There is a huge reservoir, still in use.














P.-M. had excavated the important cathedral church just outside the Nabatean Arch, which marks one end/turning point in the main street. The church was built from reused blocks, from an earlier, Roman building, and the builders marked the materials they used with mason's marks so they could be reassembled in the right order.




















Bosra is today a relatively small town, of mixed charm, to which the Hejaz steam train still comes twice a week:

If you need to know more .... click here

On my last day there, Pierre-Marie took me on a tour of some of the other Nabatean and/or Roman sites of the Hauran .... in the next blog ... and then I headed for Damascus.

Bits and Pieces

Other social activities and intellectual endeavours I have been doing:

1. The Australian Embassy Social Club party/fundraiser for the King Hussein Cancer Center 16th September. Apparently getting on the list for these parties, once a month, is one of the hottest tickets in town - unless you are in with the Royal Family - because the booze is cheap, the barmen unprofessionally liberal handed, and there can be the chance of pork sausages. Consequently, there are usually 50 local or other foreigners to one Aussie. This particular bash was very crowded - I met several Americans (security advisors in Iraq and now Afghanistan, who seemed rather sensible, so clearly they have no influence whatsoever), was trampled on by many habibitis with spiky heels dancing away, and met Niki - who was involved with our Kulcha part 2 outing (see last blog). I may very well have won several prizes having coughed up for the lucky door prize and a set of raffle tickets, but Rohan the consul is a very poor announcer, and the DJ didn't see the need to turn the music down during the draws. All for a good cause, and Rose had the phone number of the new taxi company in town, which miraculously turned up at 1.15 am (miracle being not only that they came quickly but they knew where to come, as the Australian Embassy is no-where near any landmark) and took us home. I was happy to pay the 8JD (current exchange rate is 0.68JD to the $).

2. Robert Schick and the Madaba Burnt Palace Project, 17th September. Robert, long time scholar of the southern Levant, is the first ACOR publications fellow. He was to publish the excavations of Cherie Lenzen, who was employed by ACOR to dig the Burnt Palace area of Madaba, as part of the USAID funded big project in Madaba in the late 80s. It turned out that Cherie dug in an area which largely overlapped that dug by Ghazi Bisheh, then director-general of the Department of Antiquities, now retired. Ghazi is never going to publish and since the two areas overlap (Cherie dug late - early Islamic, Ghazi dug early Islamic - early Byzantine), Robert and ACOR decided he should include the lot. This quadrupled the work load in many respects - not in pottery processing, as Ghazi only kept the diagnostics, whereas Cherie kept nearly everything - but it is also difficult to process. The material was stored, uncovered, on a roof top in Madaba for 15 years. With the notebooks. In the rain. Not to mention the labels being eaten by mice. So anyway, Robert has been able to more or less make sense of what went on, and Ghazi did find his notebooks at home, unrained on and uneaten, so he gave a presentation at ACOR. I felt so sorry for him, I agreed to write up the lamps - there aren't many and there isn't anything in particular not already known to science.

3. Peter Fischer, Tell Abu Kharaz, German Institute 19 September. Peter Fischer has been excavating the site of Tell Abu Kharaz, only a few kms down the Valley from Pella, for a number of years. It has the most extraordinary Bronze and Iron Age remains - in most cases very much better preserved than Pella. His lecture focused on the architectural phases, several of which consisted of houses preserved nearly intact. They were clever enough when digging to realise that they had come down on entire roofs which had fallen - poof! - straight down as walls bent during earthquakes. The fallen roofs then squashed flat all the pots in the rooms, and presumably the owners died elsewhere and never came back to tidy up. Or gave it up as a loss, levelled the site about 1m higher than originally, and built a new house on top of the debris. And this happened several times. Lucky ducks (the archaeologists, not the Bronze Agers).

4. The Samir Abu Dehays Collection of Jordan & Palestine, Royal Cultural Centre, 23rd September. Mr Abu Dehays was born in Haifa, grew up in Tiberias and then his family went to Lebanon after 1948. Even as a teenager, he collected stamps, coins, artefacts and memorabilia from Palestine. Leaving aside the antiquities in his collection (at least photographed and registered with the Department of Antiquities), this is a most extraordinary collection. He has hundreds of hand-tinted postcards from the late 1800s, stereoscopic views of Palestine from the 1870s onwards (I took the girls from the Museum a few days later and they had no idea that 3D existed before Avatar), lots of Bonfils photographs, 17th century maps, deeds, firearms licenses, divorce papers & all sorts of documents from the mid-19th century onwards, a fine collection of Hashemiya - my word, King Hussein was dashing when he was young!! - including every Time magazine with a Hashemite on the front cover and so on and so on. Terrific stuff. My favourite was a photo of King Hussein with Princess Mouna (nee Toni Gardner) and Abdullah (current king) and Faisal, aged about 6 and 4. Abdullah has his hands firmly around Faisal's neck and doesn't look like he means to let go.

Rose and Kate get kulcha part 2

Actually, Rose and Kate and Paula and Carrie and Niki Get Cheap Shirts and a bit of Kulcha part 2.

Paula Kouki is a Finnish researcher who was here for a few weeks (the Jabal Haroun project got sideswiped by an unexpected refusal from the al-Waqf new Minister, even though the team has never worked near the weli (shrine/mosque) and has been working for over a decade without any issues ....), Carrie you have met before in an earlier blog, and Niki is an Aussie teacher who Rose and I met at the Australian Embassy social club scrum in September. So, Carrie, Rose and I having none of us packed sensibly, all needed more shirts, in the respectable but cheap line. So Friday down at Abdalil is now an enormous second hand clothes and shoes market, with a smaller fruit and vege section at the downtown end.
But going 2nd-hand clothes shopping never really works well in a group when it is stinking hot, so after an hour we gave up - I'd bought 3 shirts, one of which doesn't fit around the hips (damn, you'd think with several bouts of Syrian belly I'd have lost enough weight to notice) and another with long sleeves, which isn't much use when it was still in the high 30s - Rose managed to buy a denim skirt that might have fitted a very small girl of about 7 years old - and Carrie was umming and ahhing about paying 1.5JD per shirt at a stall when everyone else was only charging 500 fils per item.
So we headed off to Rainbow Street and the Souq Jara, which is on every Friday during the warmer months. This is a pretty fancy market of souvenirs, jewellry and some interesting stuff, so I might go again this Friday which is the last for 2010. We were just scoping this time through. At the end of the Souq laneway (for those of you familiar with Rainbow Street, Souq Jara is held in the road running beside the Jordan River Foundation) the stairs go down to Wild Jordan, the RSCN cafe and shop in a rather nice building given as a gift to Jordan from the People of the United States. See, they can be nice sometimes. Photo op at the top of the stairs of the Qala'a Amman, with RSCN building in foreground:

After eating a nice largely organic, vegetarian meal entirely surrounded by ajanaab (foreigners), we taxi'd back to the Zara Centre, a shopping complex down hill from the Hilton near 3rd Circle. We were heading for the roof though, as there was the first-ever Zara Center Amman Street Art Fair. We paid the rather outrageous sum of 4JD to get in (got a cotton bag for the price, but then discovered you had to buy vouchers for food and drink, so we didn't) and looked quickly around the stalls. Look, I'm all for supporting the arts, and every movement has to start somewhere, but most of the exhibitors had skill levels roughly equivalent to Napoleon Dynamite. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to see the eponymous movie.

Paula, Carrie & Niki - Rose was off looking at Art

One stand out was this triptych of Um Kulthoum (click on the picture to enlarge) which the artist, a young woman Ala'a Baghdadi sold quickly as a set:

Then we taxi'd back down Rainbow Street - the taxi driver complaining all the time about the new Rami Daher designed cobblestone effect on the street which destroys taxis apparently - to Books@Cafe. This is my favourite hangout, upstairs from a very good multilingual bookshop, where there are indoor and outdoor terraces, where the sophisticated set come. I would like to take it home to Australia. Plenty of people go there and don't feel the need for alcohol, and in the late evening, like most places in Amman, it is full of groups of girls smoking naghila. Plus no blaring music, no mosquitoes, no rowdy drunks. However, it has been drawn to my attention that young men do not go there very often if they have regard for their reputation. The owner is rumoured to be gay, and so people talk ....
We being girls of course didn't have to worry about this, and discovered that rather than pay 7JD for a large draught beer each, we took a jug of beer for 12JD, which was exactly 4 decent sized glasses, which is exactly what you want after a hard day buying old clothes and looking at crap art.