Hauran

On my last day visiting Pierre-Marie, he kindly took me on a tour of the Hauran district north of Bosra. This is still the lava country, all around the Jebel Druze. And indeed, north of Bosra, one rapidly arrives in Druze country. All the younger women have their hair uncovered, there are 5-pointed, coloured rosettes everywhere, older ladies wear only plain black dresses and have elaborate white head scarves, and sometimes you see men in those baggy ?Turkish pants. This area was incredibly rich agriculturally in the past, and Suweida is in modern times the 4th largest town in Syria. We went to Suweida, as P.M. had to visit friends in the directorate there, so I checked out the museum, and we looked at the little of Roman Suweida that survives, then we drove to Canawat and Sia to see the Nabatean material, then Shahba, which was the birthplace of Philip who became the only Arab Roman Emperor. He renamed the joint Philipopolis (no ego problems, clearly) and embarked on a massive building programme. But died. So they stopped. We unfortunately had taken a very long time at the Sia Nabataean temple and so got to Shahba after the famous mosaics museum closed. Sigh. Next time. It seems a lovely town, and I'm sure Philip would be proud of it today. In the half-built, massive baths, we came across a youngish Syrian woman with an older man (?father, ?husband) who quizzed us extensively when they heard P.M. explaining things to me. Turns out she is planning on being a tour guide, and has taken it upon herself to visit as many sites as possible - they only had a Syrian guide book, and were fairly sure they were being misled by it. If only they had bought Ross Burns' Monuments of Syria (shameless plug - you will read & see in a later blog about Ross's quick visit to ACOR when he, me, Peter Edwell, Penny Hyde, Brennan Roorda and Aladdin Madi went for a picnic to Iraq el-Amir).

Now, pictures:














The Odeon at Suweida above, the main road coming into Suweida to right, with ?church in foreground, and right at the back, the remains of an arch, which was used to hang people off of in mediaeval times. Note the French style street lighting.

Suweida museum has an incredible collection of basalt statues and architectural carvings, epigraphy and mosaics. Here at the beginning of the museum though, is this terrific bit of rock art:


Here is a pretty mean looking Gorgon:

Look - these guys at least tried - could you carve basalt and make the doggie look real?

Above, Artemis surprised at her bath Above here, Venus at her toilette admiring herself


Close up of the face of Tethys showing shading.

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.

Arabic

I've been having Arabic tutoring twice a week, but am now a victim of my own success. Over the last 20 odd years, I've picked up a bit of Arabic (I'm quite useful on the repair of wheelbarrows), but it is all pretty dodgy dig arabic. Verbs are only employed in the imperative ("Give me the bucket", "Go away, boy!" "Stop!!" "Drink tea!") with only occasional phrases learnt holus bolus ("shemet howa" lit. tasting the breeze, means "hanging about"; "shu bit sowi??" (with hands raised in astonishment) means something in the order of "what the hell do you think you're doing??"). I have spent the last two years staring at the Arabic alphabet trying to learn to read and write. I got part way on the reading last BAP field season, because most road signs here are, helpfully, in Arabic and English. Also buses have their two destination points written on them, so driving along behind a bus for about half an hour gave me enough time to work out that it was going from Amman to Jerash, say.
So I didn't start lessons as a complete novice. However, Hilda is so please with my progress that on Wednesday she said, we've pretty much finished the past tense, just learn these extra 25 verbs and we can start the present tense on Saturday. So I came up to my room 2 hours ago to try and learn some vocab before my class at 10 tomorrow morning - and all I've done is check emails and write this blog!!
And since the armed guard outside the building spent the entire night last night entertaining his mates, who left their cars running while they chatted, and having his walky talky on volume setting 11 for dumb messages from the barracks (you see, the armed guard doesn't really have anything to do here, but they want to appear to be putting in an effort for security - but the slacker the guard the less likely there is to be a threat, which by and large I like, except when the guy talks ALL night outside our windows). So, I'm now too tired to learn ate, brought, sold, returned, slept over, felt jealous - when will I ever need to know that in conversation? - flew, left, emptied, filled, was hungry, entered, went, drank, did something, knew, understood, paid, drew, studied, lived in, moved something, walked, took, was absent, was afraid, became, slept, saw, said, drove, went around or died.
(early page of homework - at least my handwriting is going well)

Religious Tourism in Jordan part 2

Last Sunday I went with Feras and his cousins Bilal and Usama (Shadhi we decided was not as interested as the other two) and Carrie Swan, a Brown University doctoral student, out to Mt Nebo for another go at the tourists. This time Feras was pretty tooled up - nicely printed signs with easels, id tags for the crew, sets of questionnaires in a variety of languages (though Portuguese would have been handy as it turned out, and definitely Chinese) and seats that didn't collapse.
(Bilal, Feras and Usama, with id tags)

(professional looking research camp)

Carrie is here for the first time in Jordan, though she's worked in Turkey, Greece, Egypt and Israel. She had been stuck in ACOR, and was only too happy to lend a hand with the questionnaires in return for a trip to Mt Nebo (Feras gave her time to check out the mosaics and museum on the site) and a look at the mosaic map in Madaba after a late lunch.
(tourists doing research observed by tourist police)
Tour leaders. Mmmm. They're a mixed bunch aren't they? Some were friendly, and clearly on good terms with their groups with whom they could communicate quite well in the relevant language. Others, it's another story. A number of them told us that no-one in their tour group spoke a word of English, so couldn't do the questionnaire. Another got really cross with Feras for talking to his group without permission - South Africans as it turned out, who'd struck up a conversation with Feras behind their tour leader's back upon noticing the nicely printed University of Sydney Research sign. One took a set of 20 questionnaires to give to his group on their bus, and returned them, untouched 5 days later in Amman saying that they had had no time to fill them in. Feras subsequently visited a few in their offices here in Amman, to have one guy go through the questionnaire, toss it back across the table and say, these are stupid questions, this is rubbish research.

Feras was quite down-heartened, especially since they got blown off the mountain on Wednesday with a dust-storm - but I just got a text from him, and they got 100 completed questionnaires today from locals and internationals, so, phew, the doctorate is back on track. Bilal has taken over as registrar of the project, coding all the questionnaires as they're done, and keeping track of what is where with whom. Usama, who is a shy young man, is happy to pass around the lollies, keep track of the pencils, and spends a lot of his time plucking pine cones from the trees for elderly lady tourists of various nationalities, which for some reason they all want as souvenirs.
(Bilal, registrar)

Rose and Kate get kulcha part 1

One of the things I have been looking forward to with the Endeavour fellowship has been to have the time to get involved in the life of Amman. So today Rose Espinola (fellow Aussie Endeavour researcher, here to look into discriminatory citizenship laws for women, and intersections of sharia and international law on same) started our art gallery crawl. Barbara Porter thought we could do the National Art Gallery, the Darat al-Funan ("House of Arts") and all the Second/First circle + Rainbow Street galleries in one day. Ha! Rose and I like our art slow.

(Rose is photographing a giant slingshot called "Weapons of Mass Destruction" made by a Palestinian woman artist )

So we went off at about 10.30 - you don't want to rush this kind of thing - to Jebel Weibdeh, up from old Abdali where the Mattaf Watani (Art Gallery) is located in two buildings each side of a park which has been turned into the sculpture gallery, and Japanese garden.
I'm really disappointed that the Gallery shop did not have a single poster or postcard reproduction of any of the art in the Gallery, because some of it was just great. I'm going back to pick up the catalogue raisonne and a few other books on Jordanian artists next time I have a chance after work. I didn't have my act together to write down the names of the artists - will try and fix that later too - but here are some photos I stole (not sure on their policy about taking photos in the gallery, but heh, this is public relations):


Sculpture Park














It appears that the garbage bins of Amman breed in the Sculpture garden - or else they are Arabic daleks!










"Unity" - it's hard to tell, but the entire canvas is covered in calligraphy




Outfit from chocolate bar wrappers; I loved the pose of this Turkish oud player (1960s?) with his head back singing

I really want one of these Palestinauts:



This made me happy (Tunisian):



This made me sad (Benin "The refugee baby's bottle"):



The Gallery is run by the Royal Fine Art Society which also provides workspaces, technical facilities and this excellent library and cafe upstairs in the main building. Last year when Rose was here learning Arabic, she came to the Gallery for art cinema evenings.






Then we walked through Jebel Weibdeh to Paris Square and had lunch at the Libr@irie Cafe (complet avec French chansons playing in the background) which has a room next to the ladies labelled, I am not joking, "Stuff Closet".

Then we walked past the Luzmila Hospital, founded by the Sisters of Nazareth in 1948, named after Contessa Luz Mila, a Bolivian woman whose second husband was a cousin of Prince Rainier and who donated the X-ray department to them, down the hill to the edge of Jebel Weibdeh to the Darat al-Funan (click on link to website - I'm getting this blogging thing down now!)
This is run by the Khalid Shoman Foundation (Arab Bank founders) and seems to be the spot for contemporary art.


It is made out of 3 1920s houses, and some archaeological remains (they claim a church and a temple - but I didn't see them this time around).


We'd left our run a bit late by this stage - the disadvantage of slow art - so only really saw the exhibition by Halim al Karim Witness from Baghdad. This is a pretty confronting photography exhibition. The photo here doesn't do the works justice.


The faces are so blurry that when you get close to the panel, you can't even see them. But the eyes, without even eyelashes, are perfectly in focus, stunningly printed in colour and absolutely mesmerising. The eyes refer back as far as Sumerian art, where the sculptors also paid particular attention to the overlarge eyes. These men were disconcerting enough, but at the other end of the room were triptychs of children. Each set was made of three views of the same child's head, using the same technique of b/w blurry faces and startling colour eyes. But their mouths were taped closed.

Shiver.