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.