When it comes to understanding religion in Iron Age Jordan (ca. 1200–550 BCE), terracotta figurines offer one of our most abundant and expressive forms of archaeological evidence. These three-dimensional artistic objects fit readily into one hand (typically 10–15 cm), apparently crafted for personal use. At the same time, they appear across a range of social settings, from the household, to tombs, to temples and other public settings of formal worship. 

As in periods before and after the Iron Age, figurines take the form of animals (most often horses and bulls but sometimes others), human beings (female and male), and inanimate objects (for example, furniture). While female figurines from the southern Levant have dominated scholarly attention for decades now, much less consideration has gone to their proportionally less frequent male counterparts. For Iron Age Jordan, male figurines are well attested, numbering at least 65 published examples.

The male figurines have much to tell us about the religious beliefs and practices of people living during the Iron Age. Yet basic questions remain debated: What do these figurines represent? How did people use them in ritual? How can the male figurines help us understand relationships between household religion and other socioreligious realms in Iron Age Jordan? 

With these questions in view, I focused the research of my ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellowship for spring 2025 on male figurines from Iron Age Jordan. I have sought to interpret the male figurines based on their archaeological contexts, physical features, and comparative artistic evidence. What I found was a wide variety among the male figurines in terms of their form and subject matter, and their apparent ritual functions, along with clear indicators of the impact of the region’s political kingdoms on household religion during Iron Age II (ca. 950–550 BCE). Here are some preliminary insights with illustrating examples. 

Gods and Men: The Household and the Palace

Nearly half the identifiable male figurines survive only as head fragments (sometimes including the upper torso). These are variously hand-modeled or pressed from a mold. Male figurines lacking headgear and constructed in a variety of styles likely represent human subjects, perhaps as images of venerated human ancestors or as votive objects representing living human worshipers or embodying concerns of daily life.^[1]  

A rare instance of a fully preserved male figurine is the “traveler” from Tall as-Sa‘idiyyah in the Jordan Valley (Fig. 1). This pillar-style figurine depicts a bearded male wearing a thick headband or turban, a long-sleeved mantle, and a backpack thrown over his left shoulder, containing a large round object that James Pritchard interprets as a pilgrim flask (Pritchard 1968). This figurine’s domestic find context (dated to the mid-8^th century BCE) and the accompanying specialized objects are consistent with its place in household worship, the male figurine likely serving as a votive representing a senior male of the household (cf. Pritchard 1968, 26, 29). 

In contrast to that depiction of full clothing, six unfortunately headless figurines from several sites in Jordan portray nude males (Daviau 2022, 261, n. 7). An artistic portrayal placing nude male figures into a broader visual context is a relief frieze decorating a ceramic krater from Iron II Tall Nimrin in the east Jordan Valley (Flanagan et al. 1992). It shows a procession of nude males taking part in a fertility ritual (Dornemann 1995). Based on this comparison, nude male figurines might have served in communal or household rituals concerned with male fertility. At the same time, a stone statue of a nude male figure at roughly contemporary Khirbat al-Mudayna, in the Wadi Thamad in northern Moab, offers a presumably honorific portrayal of either an elite individual (Daviau 2022, 261) or possibly a deity. Nudity occurs as a regular motif in artistic depictions of female deities in the Levant and broader West Asia (Bloch-Smith 2014; Darby 2014, 330–338, 398–406). Given the ethnographic and comparative literary evidence for multiple representations and functions, even for the same figurine (Moorey 2003), the nude males might have portrayed a deity or supernatural being while also embodying a concern for male reproduction addressed in ritual.

A high deity is more clearly in view among figurine head fragments from Amman and locations affiliated with other material culture. Examples from outside a “palace” building at the Amman Citadel (Zayadine et al. 1989, 362), from Tall Jawa 10.5 km south of Amman (Daviau and Dion 1994), and from farther south at Tall Jalul (Younker et al. 1996) wear a form of the atef crown deriving ultimately from Egyptian tradition and appearing in Iron II stone statuary as the emblem of the leading god of the Ammonite kingdom (Abou-Assaf 1980; Daviau and Dion 1994; Burnett 2016; 2024). The Tall Jawa example’s discovery inside a domestic building, along with other cultic objects (Daviau 2003, 136–137), indicates this figurine’s function as a terracotta image of the Ammonite chief deity, perhaps a replica of larger stone statues at the capital, within domestic ritual at this outlying location. The domestic use context for this example and likely the one from Tall Jalul (Daviau 2001, 201) shows that the iconographic system supporting the Ammonite monarchy was incorporated into that of the family-based realm of domestic worship. 

Messengers and Mediating Figures: Houses, Tombs, and Public Worship Places

More than a dozen other male figurine heads wear various forms of a conic or pointed cap resembling the headgear of horse and rider figurines so well attested for the Amman Citadel and nearby sites and from the Jordan Valley (Fig. 2). The fully preserved horse-and-riders tend to bear decoration of black and white painted lines and other designs on their headgear and clothing. The uniform thus portrayed, along with the headgear’s resemblance to a pointed helmet (variously depicted for warriors in multiple ancient Near Eastern battle scenes; Dornemann 1983, 137–138), suggests a military association for these figures, although they tend to appear without weapons or other military equipment. A messenger figure might thus be the implication, especially considering the quality of swiftness the horse represents. In any case, most of the population would not have had horses, and these widely attested figurines likely reflect royal military imagery and its impact on household and family religion.  

The two-headed horse carrying a rider excavated at Tall Damiyya in the Jordan Valley (Petit and Kafafi 2016) suggests a depiction of supernatural beings. The discovery of these hybrid depictions (combining zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures) in a worship sanctuary, amid fragments of a cult stand (Petit and Kafafi 2016), and in tombs (Harding 1945; 1950) would be consistent with imagery of divine messengers mediating between higher deities and their living and deceased human worshipers. Like the atef-crowned figurines, the horse-and-riders show the institution of the monarchy to have shaped conceptions of divine-human relationships in household, mortuary, and public religious life, as well as the connections among these societal realms on the Ammonite plateau and the Jordan Valley during Iron Age II. 

Another type of mediating figure appears in male figurines attached to the entrances of ceramic miniature shrines, thus marking and guarding spatial boundaries. The best-preserved example was excavated in the Iron II temple at Khirbat Ataruz, overlooking the Dead Sea (Ji 2012, pl. 47). It features two male figurines flanking the shrine’s entrance, each with a bare upper body and holding a small animal. These guardian figures’ positioning at the threshold indicates their liminal status, mediating the boundary between divine and human, sacred and profane. 

Conclusions: Variety and Range among the Male Figurines

While questions remain, the array of male figurines yields many insights into the religion of Iron Age Jordan. Human beings and their life concerns, deities, and mediating supernatural beings find representation, with some figurines perhaps combining more than one referent. In their ritual functions, the male figurines serve as propitiatory votives, stand-ins for human worshipers, and miniature divine images, and serve other attention-focusing roles, for example, in mediating divine-human interaction. Male figurines reflect personal and family concerns such as reproduction, perpetuation of the household lineage, and care for the deceased. Other examples, such as the atef-crowned heads and horse-and-rider figurines, signal the monarchy’s relevance to the household’s general wellbeing. Continuing research and new archaeological discoveries hold promise for refining these preliminary results. What is clear is that these well-attested artistic objects embody a variety of representations, cultic functions, and socioreligious circles.

References

Abou-Assaf, A. 1980. “Untersuchungen zur ammonitischen Rundbildkunst.” Ugarit-Forschungen 12: 7–102.

Burnett, J. S. 2016. “Egyptianizing Elements in Ammonite Stone Statuary: The Atef Crown and Lotus.” In R. A. von Stucky, O. Kaelin, and H.-P. Mathys (eds.), 9 ICAANE: Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (June 9–13, 2014, University of Basel). Volume 1: Traveling Images, 57–71. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Burnett, J. S. 2024. The Amman Theater Statue in Its Iron Age Contexts, with contributions by R. Gharib and D. F. Parker. AASOR 75. Alexandria, VA: American Society of Overseas Research.

Bloch-Smith, E. 2014. “Acculturating Gender Roles: Goddess Images as Conveyors of Culture in Ancient Israel.” In I. J. de Hulster and J. M. LeMon (eds.), Image, Text, Exegesis: Iconographic Interpretation and the Hebrew Bible, 1–18. The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 588. New York: Bloomsbury.

Darby, E. 2014. Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 69. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Daviau, P. M. M. 2001. “Family Religion: Evidence for the Paraphernalia of the Domestic Cult.” P. M. M. Daviau, J. W. Wevers, and M. Weigl (eds.), The World of the Aramaeans II: Studies in History and Archaeology in Honour of Paul-Eugѐne Dion, 199–229. JSOTSup 325. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

Daviau, P. M. M. 2003. Excavations at Tall Jawa, Jordan. Volume 1: The Iron Age Town. CHANE 11. Leiden: Brill. 

Daviau, P. M. M. 2022. “Cultural Multiplicity in Northern Mo’āb: Figurines and Statues from Khirbat al-Mudaynah on the Wādī ath-Thamad.” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 14: 251–265.

Daviau, P. M. M., and P. E. Dion. 1994. “El, the God of the Ammonites? The Atef-Crowned Head from Tell Jawa, Jordan.” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 110: 158–167.

Dornemann, R. H. 1983. The Archaeology of the Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Museum.

Dornemann, R. H. 1995. “Preliminary Thoughts on the Tall Nimrin Krater.” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 5: 621–628.

Flanagan, J. W., D. W. McCreery, and K. N. Yassine. 1992. “Preliminary Report of the 1990 Excavation at Tell Nimrin.” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 36: 89–111, pls. 1–3. 

Harding, G. L. 1945. “Two Iron-Age Tombs, Amman.” Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 11: 64–74.

Harding, G. L. 1950. “An Iron-Age Tomb at Meqabelein.” Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 14: 44–48.

Ji, C.-H. 2012. “The Early Iron Age II Temple at Hirbet ’Aṭārūs and Its Architecture and Selected Cultic Objects.” In J. Kamlah (ed.), Temple Building and Temple Cult: Architecture and Cultic Paraphernalia of Temples in the Levant (2.-1. Mill. B.C.E.), 203–222, pls. 46–49. Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 41. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Moorey, P. R. S. 2003. Idols of the People: Miniature Images of Clay in the Ancient Near East. The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Petit, L., and Z. Kafafi. 2016. “Beyond the River Jordan: A Late Iron Age Sanctuary at Tell Damiyah.” Near Eastern Archaeology 79(1): 18–26.

Pritchard, J. B. 1968. “An Eighth Century Traveller.” Expedition 10(2): 26–29. 

Tuttle, Christopher A. 2009. “The Nabataean Coroplastic Arts: A Synthetic Approach for Studying Terracotta Figurines, Plaques, Vessels, and Other Clay Objects.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Brown University. 

Younker, R. W., L. T. Geraty, L. G. Herr, Ø. LaBianca, and D. Clark. 1996. “Preliminary Report of the 1994 Season of the Madaba Plains Project: Regional Survey, Tall al-‘Umayri, and Tall Jalul Excavations (June 15 to July 20, 1994).” Andrews University Seminary Studies 34(1): 65–92.

Zayadine, F., J.-B. Humbert, and M. Najjar. 1989. “The 1988 Excavations of the Citadel of Amman, Lower Terrace, Area A.” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33: 357–363.

^[1] See the list of possible representation and uses of figurines Christopher Tuttle has developed, building on the model of Peter Ucko and Mary Voigt (Tuttle 2009: 246). 

Joel Burnett is a professor of religion (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament studies) at Baylor University. His research centers around the history and religion of Iron Age Israel and Transjordan. His most recent publications include “The Persistence of El in Iron Age Israel and Ammon” (pp. 297–330 in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of P. Kyle McCarter Jr. ANEM 27, ed. C.A. Rollston, S. Garfein, and N. H. Walls. Atlanta: SBL, 2022), “Geochemical Characterization of Jordanian Basalts Using Portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry and Sourcing of the Amman Theater Statue” (coauthored with Carolyn D. Dillian, Aktham Oweidi, and Romel Gharib, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 46 [2022]: 103720), and The Amman Theater Statue in Its Iron Age Contexts (with contributions by Romel Gharib and Don F. Parker. Annual of ASOR 75. Boston: ASOR 2024).

The post Terracotta Male Figurines from Iron Age Jordan appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Addressing the cost of fuel subsidies is one of the most politically challenging reforms a government can attempt. While subsidies pose a heavy burden on budgets and tend to accrue benefits toward the wealthy, they are quite popular with a large segment of the population, as they serve as a key supplement to those with low incomes. Since announcing its intention to put an end to fuel subsidies in 2004, the Jordanian government has faced a number of political challenges. While many of these obstacles are typical of any country attempting a politically challenging reform, some of the most acute impediments have come in the form of unstable regional dynamics.

Jordan’s reforms from 2004 to 2011 were bolstered by a period of strong economic growth. Throughout this period, the kingdom experienced real GDP growth between 4% and 8%, low inflation, and high USD reserves (World Bank). While the Iraq War (2003–2011) proved difficult for Jordan’s economy, the government was aided by grants from the United States and Saudi Arabia as collateral for Jordan’s assistance in the war efforts. This period of gradual reform, assisted by foreign aid, came to an end with the onset of the Arab Spring. In particular, a series of bombings of an Egyptian pipeline that supplied gas to Israel and Jordan posed major challenges to the government’s reform efforts. As anti-government protests kicked off in Egypt, groups began sabotaging the oil pipeline that supplied Israel and, subsequently, Jordan, with cheap fuel. The Mubarak government’s decision to provide Israel with fuel had been a controversial decision within Egypt, and as anti-government protests picked up momentum, opposition forces seized the opportunity to disrupt the agreement. This move, however, had the unintended consequence of undermining the Jordanian energy sector, placing the Jordanian government in a difficult position and forcing it to address the lack of cheap fuel. 

In addition to issues caused by the Egyptian pipeline, the 2011 Arab Spring resulted in other financial difficulties for the Jordanian government. As the protests spread to Syria, it set off one of the largest refugee crises in history, with Jordan becoming one of the primary recipients of Syrian refugees. While the government has received a considerable amount of aid to host Syrians, the circumstances have also put a strain on the already weak economy. This, coupled with increased government expenses to stave off a domestic social movement, and declining revenues as tourism flagged, left the Jordanian government in a tight budgetary situation. In an effort to ward off a domestic social movement, the government reintroduced petroleum subsidies in 2011, with the cost growing to consume 3% of the GDP (Milbert 2014). In 2012, Jordan returned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the first time in eight years. 

The sabotaging of the Egyptian pipeline forced the Jordanian government to make several difficult decisions related to energy pricing. Egyptian gas previously was used to generate 80% of Jordan’s electricity. Following the loss of Egyptian fuel, the government was forced to decide between importing heavy fuel to generate electricity, which is much more expensive, or resorting to blackouts. While blackouts are not an unprecedented phenomenon and have been experienced by citizens in neighboring countries, the government made the calculation that the political situation at the time was too delicate to risk subjecting its population to blackouts, and instead they chose to import heavy fuel. 

In September 2012, the government announced an increase in fuel prices. Less than a year after the onset of the Arab Spring, tensions were already high in the kingdom, which had managed to skirt the regional uprising with a few small reforms. In line with a recommendation from the IMF, the government announced a 10% increase in the price of 90-octane gas and diesel fuel as its deficit threatened to reach a record $3 billion. However, after protestors took to the streets in Amman, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, the government quickly reversed course, canceling the planned price increase. Two months later, in November 2012, the government again announced an increase in fuel prices, this time a 14% increase for fuel and a 50% increase for cooking gas, again inciting protests across the country. This time, the government held strong and did not cancel the increase.

In mid-2022, Jordan again felt the impacts of regional turmoil, as international fuel prices started to rise as a result of the war in Ukraine. Leading up to the war, fuel prices in Jordan were fully liberalized, and the cost paid by consumers included a tax. For the past few decades in Jordan, fuel prices had been set on a monthly basis by a committee that deploys a formula to determine the price, taking into account a three-month international price lookback. The start of the war in February 2022 roughly coincided with the start of Ramadan that year. As fuel prices started to rise internationally around March to May 2022, the government began to worry that the situation could turn volatile, especially during Ramadan, when families are spending more. In order to avoid passing the 20–30% increase on to consumers, the government reduced the tax that it applies on fuel prices. Over the three-to-four-month period in which the government reduced the tax, it was estimated that the government lost about 350 million Jordanian dinar (U.S. $500 million) in revenues. 

Jordan reported that it had paid more than $700 million to maintain the cap on fuel prices during this period, but that to continue down this road further would violate their agreement with the IMF to keep spending on subsidies low (Benny 2022). After reaching the limit of what they were willing to subsidize, the Jordanian government announced an increase in fuel prices in December 2022. Truck and public transportation drivers —who are most sensitive to the price increases — were quick to respond, going on strike and rioting throughout the country. Strikers and protestors expressed anger not only with the rise in fuel prices but also with generally poor economic and living conditions, as growth had stagnated over the past decade. The government responded by indicating that fuel prices would be decreased the next month. 

These incidents do not represent the first time the Jordanian government has been forced to reckon with challenging political dynamics, and they likely will not be the last. However, it seems that each time the government faces a challenging political situation, it learns from its mistakes or miscalculations and takes these lessons into account in the future. The first way the government does this is in its messaging, ensuring that it completes comprehensive public messaging campaigns prior to implementing any price increases. In particular, the government has sought to communicate to the public the regressive and wasteful nature of subsidies and emphasize that the money saved will be directed towards cash transfers and other benefits for the poor. Jordan has also seen a slowly shrinking space for public opposition in recent years, which makes it more difficult for citizens to voice their resistance to contentious decisions. And finally, the government has become increasingly adept at making slow, incremental changes, such that they are less detectable. With each of these lessons learned, the government has become more proficient at reform, and the last of subsidies have begun to disappear in Jordan.  

References

Benny, John. 2022. “Why Rising Fuel Prices Have Triggered Violent Protests in Jordan.” The National, 18 December 2022.

Milbert, Svetlana. 2014. “Jordan: Improving Economic Growth through Energy Reforms.” Atlantic Council, Atlantic Council, 25 July 2014.

World Bank. “GDP Growth (Annual %) – Jordan.” The World Bank Data. Accessed 20 May 2024. 

Molly Hickey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is interested in the political economy of authoritarianism, the politics of foreign aid, and social policy reform in the Middle East. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked on USAID projects in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. She was a 2019–2020 Fulbright Student Fellow in Jordan, where she researched the politics of Syrian refugee labor permits and the closed professions. She graduated with a BA in international political economy and Middle East/North Africa studies from Pitzer College. She received an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellowship for 2023–2024.

The post How Regional Dynamics Impact Domestic Politics: The Case of Fuel Subsidy Reform in Jordan appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

My ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which I undertook in spring 2024, focused on the preparation of an upcoming volume entitled Archaeological Expedition to Khirbat Iskandar and Its Environs, Vol. 2: Final Report on the Early Bronze IV Area B Settlements. The goal was to revise several chapters, one being a field report on one of the EB IV settlements at the site, specifically Phase B (the earlier of two major settlements in Area B). I was able to accomplish a complete revision and reanalysis of the Phase B chapter, along with much work finalizing the accompanying illustrations, as well as to work with my draftsman to finalize plates to go with two of my chapters on ceramics. Also, part of the work included assembling and editing specialist reports. Pulling all these materials together can be a herculean task normally taking years to process, analyze, and describe, all before writing up the materials. All of this is to say that finalizing an excavation field report for publication is no easy task.

For the purposes of this brief essay, I choose to discuss one exceptional discovery made during my residency at the American Center while researching and writing my chapter on “The Stratigraphy of Phase B.” The discovery concerned EB IV religion, cult, and ritual — an archaeological category thought nonexistent in the period — along with other aspects of complexity, e.g., trade, art, advanced technology, monumental architecture, complex society, defenses, planned sites, non-nucleated population density, economy, etc. The reason for this is that for a long time the EB IV was called a “dark age” and a “pastoral-nomadic interlude.” More recently, thanks to the excavation of Khirbat Iskandar and other permanent settlement sites, we know that the sedentary, agrarian-based populations were as important as the mobile pastoral ones during the period. I have written much about the site and the EB IV generally, hoping to convince the scholarly community of the significant level of social complexity in the period in almost all the above categories; now I can add religion to this complexity as well.

First, a little background on Khirbat Iskandar is in order. The site is located in the south-central plateau area of Jordan, some 4–5 miles north of Dhiban, on the north bank of the Wadi Wala. Strategically, the site sits astride the ancient “King’s Highway,” guarding the caravan route at the crossing of the bridge over the wadi. This Early Bronze Age site (ca. 3700–2000 BCE) is best known for its occupational phases stretching over a highly controversial historical and archaeological transition: the EB III (urban)–EB IV non-urban period. At 2500 cal BCE (the date is precise due to Bayesian radiocarbon modelling), urbanism (EB III) “collapsed,” ushering in the rural / non-urban / post-urban EB IV period. Scholars are still attempting to explain the causes of this highly debated and controversial topic. The view from Khirbat Iskandar and Jordan, generally, is one of cultural continuity amidst change. A recent season at Khirbat Iskandar has revealed unquestionable evidence for stratigraphic continuity between EB III and EB IV. 

With that short background, I would like to discuss the two areas of cult and ritual at Khirbat Iskandar. While revising the Phase B materials, it became clear to me that the northern area (the public complex) and the western area (cultic features), if considered together, epitomized a sacred compound not unlike those known from the preceding urban EB II–III periods. This insight arose only after intensive research comparing the features and material culture discovered at the site with antecedent EBA materials. Thus, I am proposing a unique EB IV Sacred Complex at Khirbat Iskandar, not unlike those known from the EBA. 

Along the northern fortifications, there is a Public Complex comprising a storage center / sanctuary, and along the western fortifications, there is a contiguous outdoor cult area. Of the eight-roomed Public Complex in the north, the two most important rooms and their features, the Central Room and the Bench Room, document what I believe is a small rural EB IV sanctuary / temple exhibiting linkages with antecedent EB III architectural, cultic, and ritual traditions and symbolism. The unique EB IV bench room was a repository for vessels used in the cult, both vessels used for libations and vessels used for storage of grains and oil (185 whole and restorable vessels, including many storage jars were found in the Public Complex). Most EBA sanctuaries / temples include a bench room for votives — a clear parallel for our bench room. The Central Room, reached by an impressive entrance of three steps at the end of a long pathway, included 12 cultic features: libation bin, hearth, firepit, mortar, stonework slab, offering table, niche with stepped platform, and favissa (cultic storage pit), along with additional features pointing to the importance of the room: pillar bases, pavement, plaster refinishing, etc. The Central Room matches EB II–III temples in being a broad room (door on the long side) with the axis point being the doorway straight across from the offering table and niche. The discovery of a favissa with the hoof of a bovine set into a decorative bowl and nearby goat horns exemplifies a ritual offering to the gods. Notably, there were 28 miniature vessels found in Phase B, most in the Public Complex—a sure sign of cultic practices as well.  Additional evidence for the processing and preparation of foodstuffs for offerings are grains, legumes, and animal remains found in context. 

New analysis and research brought to light a contiguous area along the western fortifications, which proved to be a sacred outdoor cult area consisting of: 1) a sacrificial platform (Fig. 1), 2) a pillar / offering table installation, 3) a second altar, possibly for butchering, 4) a basin with votive cups, 5) another pillar, 6) two massive pillar bases, 7) and elite objects / gifts (ceramic bull’s head, precious miniature bronze spearhead). In addition, it was possible to reconstruct an enclosure wall around this area. Now that all the disparate cultic features can be shown to be a sacred area separate from, but obviously associated with, the Sanctuary in the Public Complex, the parallels with antecedent EBA sacred complexes are more than apparent. Summarily, one can connect this combined outdoor cult area / sanctuary to EBA sites such as Betrawy, Zeraqoun, Bab adh-Dhra‘, Megiddo, and others. These sites have sacred areas comprising a broad-room temple, often with benches, perhaps standing stones, pillars, pits, and bins, and, significantly, an enclosed outdoor large stone sacrificial platform.

From my intense work at the center during my ACOR-CAORC fellowship, a new perspective on cult and ritual in the EB IV period emerged. It became clear that the two separate areas of sacred space described above (Sanctuary and Outdoor Cult Area), if combined, must be seen as a sacred compound, a conclusion that adds even more support to the view of complexity in the EB IV realm of cult / religion / ritual, as well as EB III/IV continuity at Khirbat Iskandar and in Jordan generally.

Suzanne Richard is Distinguished Professor of History and Archaeology at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, and directs the Collins Institute for Archaeology Research and the Archaeology Museum Gallery. She is the PI of the Archaeological Expedition to Khirbat Iskandar and its Environs, Jordan, and co-director of the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP). Her research focuses on the Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant, and with her CAORC fellowship at ACOR (spring 2024), she worked on preparing the following volume for publication: Archaeological Expedition to Khirbat Iskandar and Its Environs Vol. 2: Final Report on the Early Bronze IV Area B Settlements.

The post The Early Bronze Age IV Cultic Complex at Khirbat Iskandar appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

For Islamic intellectual and social historians, medieval manuscripts are indispensable primary sources for investigating what ideas and perspectives were being discussed in a given time period and region. Islamic manuscript repositories are often difficult to access and the manuscripts they contain even more difficult to read and assess, requiring the researcher to become a self-taught expert in codicology. Codicology concerns itself with the study of the materials, instruments, and stylistic norms involved in the production of codices (bound medieval manuscripts).  Familiarizing oneself with the materials used in book production, handwriting styles of specific eras, and the tools used in manuscript illumination can not only help identify the date and region in which a manuscript was produced but also help discover who the author was or what role he may have played in a specific social context.

While I was at the American Center of Research as an ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow in 2023, my primary focus was to complete my book on blasphemy (sabb al-rasūl) as a legal category in medieval Islamic history, a project that entails researching and reading dozens of Mamluk manuscripts. Many historians are surprised to learn that Amman is home to a significant Mamluk manuscript repository — the Center for Documents and Manuscripts (CDM) at the University of Jordan. Across the street from the American Center, the CDM collection contains more than 30,000 manuscripts from the Ottoman, Mamluk, and Fatimid eras.

The CDM has become an important but untapped regional center for primary sources in recent years. The institution has been collecting digitized copies of Mamluk archives and manuscripts from other repositories in the Middle East for more than three decades. With the onset of the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, most of Syria’s libraries are now either inaccessible or destroyed. The digitized copies at the CDM are what remain, especially with regard to manuscript collections in Damascus and Aleppo (Fig. 1).

Colleagues often ask me how does one distinguish Mamluk manuscripts from those of other periods, such as the Ottoman or Fatimid eras, and how does one determine its specific attributes, such as age, authorship, and scribal history? In a previous Insights essay, I addressed the material construction of codices in an Ottoman context and how historians examine physical aspects of codex construction in order to date its manuscript. I shall now address how historians use calligraphic script to estimate the age and geographic origins of a manuscript, with special attention to the Mamluk era.  

Typologies of Arabic Calligraphy under the Mamluk Empire 

An important clue when attempting to identify the era and region in which a manuscript was produced is the style of handwriting or calligraphy used by the scribe or copyist and, in relevant instances, to what degree manuscript illumination influenced the lined text. Tenth-century Persian ‘Abbasid vizier Ibn Muqla (d. AD 940), who was both a high-level bureaucrat and famed calligrapher, played a significant role in canonizing and recording the history of the evolution of Arabic calligraphic styles (Safadi 1970: 17). We know from Ibn Muqla that, by the 10^th century, six Arabic scripts had come to dominate Islamic calligraphy in the Muslim world: thuluth, naskh, muḥaqqaq, rayḥān, riqʿa, and tawqiʿ (Mansour 2011: 49–51). Yāqūt al-Mustaʿṣimī (d. AD 1298), the mamlūk of al-Mustaʿṣim, last ʿAbbasid caliph to rule from Baghdad, left his mark on script canonization as well by inventing new ways to cut reed writing instruments in such a way as to gain greater precision in strokes of the brush and pen. This increased precision allowed calligraphers to sharpen the ornamental distinctions between each style even more than was previously possible (Safadi 1970: 18) (Fig. 2).

We know through 14^th-century Mamluk-era Egyptian bureaucrat and scribe Al Qalqashandī (d. AD 1418) that the five scripts known to be in popular circulation during his time in the Mamluk Empire were thuluth, naskh, muḥaqqaq, riqʿa, and tawqiʿ. In other words, the rayḥān script, while still dominant in Central Asia, was no longer dominant in the Levant and Egypt (Blair 2011: 316–319). As part of their bureaucratic inclination for nomenclature and classification, late Mamluk-era scribes categorized scripts into two groups: rectilinear and curvilinear.  Rectilinear scripts, which included naskh and muḥaqqaq, are straight scripts characterized by a certain vertical flatness (bast) and rigidity (yabs) of the sublinear brush strokes of Arabic letters. The sublinear brush strokes of Arabic letters in curvilinear scripts, which included thuluth, riqʿa, and tawqiʿ, on the other hand, have a rounded quality (taqwīr) (Blair 2011: 336) (Fig. 3).

By the 15^th century, rectilinear script was predominantly used by Mamluk calligraphers working on books that had a decorative component and were meant for public viewing, such as Qur’anic codices and other famous religious texts owned by the Mamluk Sultanate or wealthy patrons. Curvilinear script, on the other hand, came to be used largely by chancery employees, including state-appointed scribes and secretaries, for internal official documentation meant for record-keeping rather than decorative display (Blair 2011: 334–335) (Fig. 4).

Dating Mamluk Manuscripts Based on Calligraphic Style 

The usage of rectilinear scripts during the Mamluk era evolved over time, and it is in this context that knowledge of calligraphic styles becomes essential in dating manuscripts. The Bahri Mamluks, who were of Turkic origin, ruled the Mamluk empire from AD 1250 to 1382 and were succeeded by another Mamluk regime, the Burji Mamluks, who were of Circassian origin. The early Bahri Mamluks were far more interested in investing resources to maintain political stability, define territorial boundaries, and develop a far-reaching bureaucracy than investing in the arts. Codices intended for public display during this era up until the early 14^th century were usually written in a conservative naskh script with far less manuscript illumination than what was found in the artistic productions of their eastern neighbors (Gacek 1989: 144) (Fig. 5).

This status quo would change, however, and with increased political stability the Bahri Mamluks came to invest in a variety of artistic endeavors in the realms of metallurgy, textiles, and manuscript illumination (Mansour 2011: 31). By the middle of the 14^th century, codices not only contained considerably more decorative illumination with increasingly expensive ink and materials but also shifted from being written in the simpler naskh script to the more decorative muḥaqqaq (Mansour 2011: 31) (Fig. 6). The muḥaqqaq script would continue to dominate until the 15^th century.  It would only be with the succession of the Burji Mamluks and subsequently the Ottomans that the naskh script would be reintroduced as the preferred calligraphic style once more (Gacek 2012: 140–141) (Fig. 7).

Differences in script usage and style were not only temporal but regional as well. Putting material differences such as ink and codex material construction aside, what constituted muḥaqqaq script in 14^th-century Egyptian and Levantine Mamluk manuscripts had slightly different stylistic characteristics compared to muḥaqqaq in Persian manuscripts completed in Iran during the same era. For example, the alif in the Mamluk muḥaqqaq script measured ten dots in height, while the alif in the Persian muḥaqqaq script measured only eight dots in height (Gacek 2012: 140–141). Standard Mamluk manuscripts in muḥaqqaq script were eleven lines of text to a page, whereas those of the Persian Ilkhanate were five lines long, yielding much longer codices and more illumination per page around the text (Blair 2011: 321–322). Mamluk calligraphers, newer to the tradition of muḥaqqaq writing, struggled with consistent line and word spacing in ways that were noticeable compared to the precisely designed calligraphy and illumination completed by Persian Ilkhanate calligraphers (Blair 2011: 321–322) (Fig. 8).

Examining the sample of manuscript images just in this article, one could start to envision the sort of process a historian might go through to begin dating a manuscript. Taking note of the heavy and precise illumination, along with the curvilinear script, one might deduce the possibility that Figure 2 is an Iraqi ‘Abbasid manuscript. Comparing Figures 5 and 6, one might observe the sparse illumination in the former manuscript compared to the latter, as well as naskh versus muḥaqqaq script, to confirm that Figure 5 is from an early Bahri Mamluk era, and Figure 6 from the late Bahri Mamluk period, after the middle of the 14^thcentury. The heavy illumination of Figure 7, coupled with its naskh script, could help identify this manuscript as Ottoman. And, finally, comparing the length of the alif in Figure 8 and Figure 6, plus noting the five-line structure and muḥaqqaq script, might help the researcher identify the former image as being that of a Persian manuscript and the latter that of a Bahri Mamluk one. Altogether, script identification and an awareness of illumination styles and varying types of codex construction are all elements that provide clues to the material historian on the date and regional origin of a medieval manuscript. 

References

Blair, Sheila. 2011. Islamic Calligraphy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Foroqui, Suraiya. 1999. Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gacek, Adam. 1989. “Arabic Scripts and their Characteristics as Seen Through the Eyes of Mamluk Authors.” Manuscripts of the Middle East 4: 144–149.

Gacek, Adam. 2012. Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers. Leiden: Brill.

Mansour, Nassar. 2011. Sacred Script: Muḥaqqaq in Early Islamic Calligraphy. London: Tauris.

Safadi, Yasin H. 1970. Islamic Calligraphy. Leiden: Brill.

Sarah Islam’s research focuses on the social and intellectual history of Islamic criminal law, and on how relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the medieval context affected the development of jurisprudence and legal institutional norms across all three communities, despite internal polemics often arguing otherwise. Her first book project, Blasphemy (Sabb al-Rasūl) as a Legal Category in Early and Medieval Islamic History, examines the evolution of blasphemy as a legal category among capital crimes in Islamic legal history. Her research has been supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright Program, and the American Center of Research, where she has been an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellow (2015 – 2016) and ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow (2022 – 2023). Her academic work has been published by Sage, Brill, and Oxford University Presses.

The post Dating Mamluk Manuscripts from Levantine Collections appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

In the 1920s pilots flying over the Harrat ash-Sham volcanic fields (also known as the Black Desert) were struck by a landscape that was “rugged and desolate” (Maitland 1927: 198), “like a dead fire — nothing but cold ashes” (Rees 1929: 389), whose “odious flat-topped slag heaps” instilled a “sinister foreboding” and the “epitome of loneliness” (Hill 1929: 3). It is likely that most people who fly above the Black Desert today would agree with these observations. Yet 9,500 years ago the situation was far removed from the conditions of today. Whereas the number of transhumant Bedouin herders in the 1920s may have numbered several thousand in the Black Desert (including its extensions into Syria and Saudi Arabia), a very different climate regime that included up to 60% more annual rainfall created a more luxuriant countryside, where water remained available for many months — perhaps all year — and grasslands that fed larger populations of domesticated and wild animals; in such a scenario, groups of people and their herds of sheep, goats, and perhaps cattle, enjoyed a more sedentary life.

The Eastern Badia Archaeological Project (EBAP), co-directed by Yorke Rowan, Alexander Wasse, Morag Kersel, and me, began surveys and excavations of six structures at Wisad Pools and the in Wadi al-Qattafi in 2008. At Wisad, where it is estimated that there are at least 300 structures (Fig. 1), one (W400) was occupied from ca. 7,000 to 6,500 BCE; W110 habitation lasted a perhaps a couple of centuries around 6700 BCE; W66 was occupied with interruptions from about 6400 to 5500 BCE; and W80 (the largest) from possibly 7200 (radiocarbon date pending) to 5600 BCE, again with two or three periods of abandonment. Some 30 km west of Wisad, as many as 800 buildings lie on the lower slopes of the basalt-capped mesas in the Wadi al-Qattafi, of which two were investigated. Mesa 7 structure SS-1 is approximately the same size as W80 and lasted from ca. 6500 to 6000 BCE. Building SS-11 on the southern slope of nearby Mesa 4 is rather small, just over 6 m² in floor area, and is attached to an animal enclosure.

In the twelve field seasons of the project, more than 24,000 chipped-stone artifacts, including 11,621 tools, 3,380 cores, and 9,124 pieces of debitage and fragments, spanning 1,600 years of the Late Neolithic Period (and a few artifacts from the last 200 years of the 8th millennium), were found. This inventory offers a database produced by a single analyst using five metric and twenty-seven qualitative variables sorted to phases of local habitation in a series of stratified deposits that can trace changes in what tools were made and by what techniques and styles. The results of the global analysis reflect strong conformity in many aspects of lithic production, but the data also show remarkable local singularity in some of the categories, which raises some intriguing questions of what might account for widespread matching behavior patterns and what may have caused distinctive local deviations from otherwise “normal” or “expected” practices. The following discussion will look at differences in what types of tools were manufactured, how some of those types changed over that length of time, how the quantities of specific tool types varied and what this might mean in terms of subsistence economy, and the role of specialization.

Arrowheads: Numbers and Forms

Investigations of the faunal remains from the excavations at Wisad (on the eastern edge of the basalt) and in the Wadi al-Qattafi (at the western edge) indicate that there was a strong similarity in terms of the importance of hunting wild mammals (especially gazelle) and caprine herding (Martin et al. 2022). It might be expected that the focus on gazelle in both Wisad and Qattafi would use the same kind of hunting equipment, but this was not the case. At Wisad W80, arrowhead styles that were prevalent before 6600 BCE rapidly switched from Haparsa/Nizzanim/Herzliya points to a predominance (80%) of relatively tiny transverse arrowheads that, instead of being pointed, bore a broad razor edge at the tip (Fig. 2). At Qattafi only three transverse arrowheads were recovered, and they are clearly produced by someone who had heard of the type but had had no experience in making them. But one point type — the Badia point, long and relatively heavy — made up 16% of the arrowheads, and no Badia points were found at W80.

Drills

Drills (Fig. 3) were made at all the excavated buildings, and nominally they were for the production of beads of stone, bone, and shell. Bead drills were very numerous at Qattafi SS-1 (11%), more than any other building except for Wisad W400, which was clearly a “drill factory,” with a stunning number of 919 pieces (58% of the tool kit). Beyond the amazing popularity of drills, the number of beads is only a handful, in addition to which there were no stored materials to be made into beads and no tools to shape the blanks into beads. Even so, W400 is certainly an example of specialization by one or several people, and there are other examples of specialization, as at Jilat 13 and Jilat 25 (Wright et al. 2008) and Bawwabat al-Ghazal. (Rollefson et al. 1999).

In addition to hand drills and rotary, there are considerable numbers of burin spalls retouched to extremely acuminated piercing tools; a better name for the tools might be “needles,” with tips at 1 mm diameter. The thinness at the tip suggests a vulnerability to snapping if used against a hard surface such as shell, bone, or stone, and a function other than bead drill is much more likely. A possible reason for fashioning the delicate needles might be for tattooing skin (human or leather), although evidence for such a function has not been recovered.

Denticulates

As became immediately clear while clearing a small patch of Phragmites reeds on the western edge of the southern pool at Azraq, one does not simply pull the reeds out of the ground. That may explain the strong presence of denticulates at the buildings at Qattafi and Wisad. This type comes in two versions: regular denticulates and microdenticulates (Fig. 4). The saw-like edge on the former tool is relatively long with wide adjacent notches and strong, sharp points between them. The second type uses much smaller adjacent notches and would probably have been selected for finer work.

The basalt walls of the structures at Wisad and Qattafi were built to a height of about a meter, but they did not support a roof. Wilfred Thesiger (2000) demonstrated how versatile and effective cane reeds could be used for roofing, and with permanent or nearly permanent water in the mudflats in the Black Desert during the Late Neolithic, there would have been an abundance of roofing material to construct a dome over the structures. The vicious-looking regular denticulates would have been used to harvest the larger reeds, and the microdenticulates used for cutting arrow shafts.

Wedges

Wedges (or “splintered pieces”) (Fig. 5) have long been known and are usually characterized as “debitage” (Betts and Kafafi 1992: 157), but we consider them to be an important component of the tool kit of the Late Neolithic industry of the Black Desert. They range from only 2% in M7 SS-1 at Qattafi to 9% at Wisad W80, 10% at W66, and 14% at W400. The tool is distinguished by heavy severe bifacial battering on opposed ends, or lateral edges, or on all opposed edges. The apparent manner of use can be described as fragments of blades or flakes, held between thumb and forefinger, and hammered with a stone. The intent of wedges is to split longitudinally objects such as reeds or animal bone; the first use is to provide slats for weaving mats used as roofing and flooring, as well as baskets and other containers, and the second to split animal bone to extract marrow.

Polyhedrons

Polyhedrons are not tools; they are geometric objects shaped by percussion into cuboid, spherical, and pyramidal forms, ranging in mean dimensions of 14 mm high to 10 by 11 mm basal width (Fig. 6). They normally are made from fine-quality translucent flint of clear quartz, brown, tan, and white. They have absolutely no visible utilitarian function except, perhaps, as tokens in games, something also suggested by Fujii (2006) and D. Cropper (2011); such games are indicated by fifty-three game boards from the Late PPNB  (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) period into the Late Neolithic and appear to be antecedents of such games as those found at Mesopotamian cities in the 4th through 1st millennia BCE (Rollefson forthcoming).

References

Betts, A. and Kafafi, Z. 1992. “Aspects of the Neolithic Periods in Jordan.” Paléorient 18(2): 156–158.

Cropper, D. 2011. Lithic Technology and Regional Variation in Late Neolithic Jordan. BAR International Series 2291. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Fujii, S. 2006. “Wadi Abu Tulayha: A Preliminary Report of the 2005 Spring and Summer Excavation Seasons of the al-Jafr Basin Prehistoric Project, Phase 2.” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 50: 9–31.

Hill, R. 1929. The Baghdad Air Mail. London: Edward Arnold & Co.

Maitland, P. 1927. “The ‘Works of the Old Men’ of Arabia.” Antiquity 1: 196–203.

Martin, L. and Saritas, Ö., with Rollefson, G. Rowan, Y. and Wasse, A. 2022. “New Insights into Late Neolithic Herding in the Jordanian Harra: Zooarchaeological Results from Wisad Pools and Wadi al-Qattafi.” Paper presented at The Archaeozoology of Southwest Asia and Adjacent Areas International Meeting, Tokyo, 28 November 28–2 December 2022.

Rees, L. 1929. “The Transjordan Desert.” Antiquity 3: 389–407.

Rollefson, G. Forthcoming. “What Are the Odds? Neolithic Game Boards from the Levant.” In Desert Journeys: Papers on the Prehistory and Protohistory of the Arid Southern Levant. Journal of Arid Land Environments.

Rollefson, G., Quintero, L. and Wilke, P. 1999. “Bawwab al-Ghazal: Preliminary Report on the 1998 Testing Season.” Neo-Lithics 1/99: 2–4.

Thesiger, W. 2000. The Marsh Arabs. London: HarperCollins.

Wright, K., Critchley, P. and Garrard, A. 2008. S”tone Bead Technologies and Early Craft

Specialization: Insights from Two Neolithic Sites in Eastern Jordan.” Levant 40(2): 131–165.

Gary Rollefson, a 2023–2024 ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow, is professor emeritus of anthropology at Whitman College in Washington State and at San Diego State University. He began prehistoric research at Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in the Azraq Wetlands in 1978, but in 1982 became the principal investigator at ‘Ain Ghazal. Since 2008 he has been co-director of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project in the basalt region of eastern Jordan. His publications number more than 380 and include three co-edited books on prehistoric Jordan.

The post Decoding Late Neolithic Tools and Technology in the Black Desert of Jordan appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

The former capital of the ancient Nabataean Empire, the city of Petra serves today as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s most popular tourist destination. Tourism constitutes the lifeblood of three tribal communities that live in and around Petra Archaeological Park: the Bidul of Umm Sayhoun, the Layathna of Wadi Musa, and the Ammarin of Bayda. Most members of these communities rely on tourism-sector revenues to make a living (Reeves 2023). Spanning formal and informal economies, local involvement in Petra’s tourism industry includes selling souvenirs and rides on horses, donkeys, and camels to visitors, owning and staffing hotels and restaurants in Wadi Musa, and working for the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority (PDTRA), which governs the archaeological park and its surrounding communities.

The powerful revenue-generating opportunities associated with visitor flows to Petra have unleashed considerable competition among local groups seeking to secure greater access to the city’s tourism economy. This competition manifests, for example, in conflicting narratives propagated by local tribespeople who seek to legitimize their own participation in the tourism sector while calling into question the work of rival tribes. Both the Bidul and the Layathna leverage their history in the Petra region for this purpose. The Bidul, for example, rely on oral histories that convey the tribe’s physical connection to the city as former inhabitants of its caves (Reeves 2020). On the other hand, the Layathna point to their role in helping to drive Ottoman forces out of the Petra region during the 1916–1918 Great Arab Revolt as evidence of their importance as the city’s protectors (Reeves 2022). These narratives demonstrate the importance of the past as a legitimizing force undergirding present-day claims to Petra’s tourism revenues.

In this essay, I demonstrate that the relationship between the past and present is bidirectional.^[1] Factors related to tribal geographies in Petra today impact stories about the Bidul’s and Layathna’s past to the same extent that the oral histories of the two groups exercise a (de)legitimating effect on their present-day tourism-related work. I reveal the effect present realities exercise on the past through examining the efforts of Bidul and Layathna tribespeople to cast doubt on each other’s historical connection to the region by propagating narratives about contemporary places in Petra. These narratives reveal that Bidul and Layathna efforts to prove that they are indigenous to the Petra region involve not only historical arguments but also claims based on the two tribes’ current positions in the city’s political economy.

Places and the Past

Places, connected by nature to present-day realities on the ground, become instruments in local stories that serve to connect some of the region’s current residents to Petra’s past while erasing others from it. The Layathna propagate this dynamic by leveraging the intertribal distribution of territory in Petra today to legitimize their presence in the region while delegitimizing that of the Bidul. The following narrative articulated by Abu Saif al-Nasrat^[2] accomplishes this dual purpose:

“After 1900, some individuals from the Bidul came and settled in the caves. They deny this reality through different claims, such as that they have origins [here]. They do this in order to give some type of legitimacy to their presence. Their presence is very recent. It does not exceed 120 years. To the contrary, the Layathna were mentioned in the year 1300. There are historical sources, not just talk…. The Bidul say that they belong to the Howeitat [a large tribe in southern Jordan], but the Howeitat refuse them completely. The Bidul are different from them. Every once in a while, they spread a new narrative. However, you have to look at it logically. In any place, if you have lived there for a long time — in the tribal system, this is reflected in the tribe’s power and property. You see? Your strength as a tribe is measured in power and property. Where is your land? They have none. The land that they reside on now, the village that they have settled in — all of that land belongs originally to the Layathna.”

Abu Saif’s rhetorical inquiry into the location of the Bidul’s territory today succinctly casts doubt on the tribe’s historical presence in Petra. At first glance, this line of argumentation is convincing. After all, the Bidul do not own territory within Petra today. The areas the tribe claims as its historical domain are located within the state-owned confines of Petra Archaeological Park (Reeves 2023). Furthermore, Umm Sayhoun — the village adjacent to Petra that the government built for the Bidul after removing the group from the ancient city’s caves in the 1980s — sits on land taken from the Layathna via eminent domain (Reeves 2022).

Yet, these details constitute precisely the nuances that place-based argumentation covers up. Abu Saif’s narration projects the present into the past without alteration, painting a static picture of Petra’s tribal history in the process. For this reason, there is no space in Abu Saif’s narrative for the tremendous changes the region witnessed with respect to the intertribal balance of power over the past 150 years alone. For instance, the Bidul’s deletion from Petra’s history by virtue of their lack of territory today neglects the tribe’s tremendous power in the 19th century, when Sheikh Imgaibel Abu Zaitoun al-Bidul’s dominance over the Petra region was entrenched to the degree that he imposed a tax on travelers wishing to enter the rose-red city (Reeves 2021). Moreover, the projection of the present into the past presents a misleading image of the historical role of land in southern Jordan. To the degree that fixed, territory-based identities existed before the extension of state sovereignty to the area in the final decades of Ottoman rule, they were associated predominantly with small farming villages — such as Wadi Musa — that dotted the ranges of large nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, such as the Howeitat.

Considering the Bidul’s own status as a formerly semi-nomadic tribe, the salience of place-based claims in their own legitimacy-contesting narratives is anachronistic as well. Abu Muhammad al-Bidul articulated one such argument:

“If you go to our graves in Petra, inside Petra, beyond the Snake Monument, there is nobody from Wadi Musa buried there. What does that demonstrate? That demonstrates that not one of them was an inhabitant of that area. That’s the biggest piece of evidence. If you asked someone [from Wadi Musa], ‘your grandfather, where is he buried in Petra?’ He’ll go like this: [shrugs]. Because he was not buried in Petra!”

Beyond the graves of their ancestors, other place-based arguments that Bidul tribespeople employ involve their intimate knowledge of Petra’s geography and the presence of human remains in some of the city’s caves — bones that the Bidul allege belong to tribal ancestors who died in a 19th-century cholera epidemic. As was the case with Abu Saif’s observations about Bidul land ownership, Abu Muhammad’s point concerning the lack of Layathna remains within Petra Archaeological Park once again instrumentalizes present realities to cast doubt upon another tribe’s history in the ancient city.

Conclusion

Outside the immediate context of competition over tourism revenues in Petra, Bidul and Layathna narratives that place the present in the past indicate that history itself changes as the circumstances in which stories about the past are narrated evolve. Elsewhere in Jordan, anthropologist Andrew Shryock (1997) observed a related transformation in the Balga region, where educated Abbadi tribesmen had begun using the written word as a means to “formalize” contentious, theretofore orally transmitted aspects of their ancestors’ fraught relationship with the powerful Adwan tribe. While the often harmful employment of placed-based narratives is a contemporary cause for concern in Petra, their use also points to a possible step to address the destructive effects of intertribal competition in the city’s tourism economy. Given the importance of the past to Petra’s contemporary political-economic landscape, providing a venue — such as a museum dedicated to oral history — for the region’s tribes to propagate stories about their forefathers in a non-contentious manner would enhance the legitimacy of all of the local communities that call Petra home today.

—————

References

Reeves, N. 2020. “Shaykhs and Tribal Entrepreneurs: Tribal Hierarchies, Government Development Policies, and the Struggle over Representation in Petra’s Tourism Economy.” Oxford Middle East Review 4.1: https://omerjournal.com/2020/07/03/shaykhs-and-tribal-entrepreneurs-tribal-hierarchies-governmental-development-policies-and-the-struggle-over-representation-in-petras-tourism-economy/.

Reeves, N. 2021. “Erasing History: Rival Tribal Narratives, Official Regime Discourse, and the Exclusionary Debate over Indigeneity in Petra, Jordan.” ESIA Dean’s Scholars Journal, 28 September 2021. https://blogs.gwu.edu/esiadeansscholarsjournal/2022/08/01/erasing-history-rival-tribal-narratives-official-regime-discourse-and-the-exclusionary-debate-over-indigeneity-in-petra-jordan/.

Reeves, N. 2022. “Bayn al-Māḍī wa-l-Ḥāḍir: Hikāyāt Abnāʾ Qabīlatay al-Bidūl wa-l-Layāthna al-Tārīkhiyya wa-Ahmiyatuhā al-Mustamira fī-l-ʿAṣr al-Rāhin” [“Between Past and Present: The Oral Histories of the Bidul and Layathna Tribes and Their Ongoing Importance in the Present Day”]. Abhath Al-Yarmouk: Humanities and Social Sciences Series 31.1: 1–23. https://journals.yu.edu.jo/ayhss/Issues/Vol31No12022.pdf.

Reeves, N. 2023. “Bringing Order to Petra’s Tourism Economy.” Tourism Cases. https://doi.org/10.1079/tourism.2023.0010.

Shyrock, A. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

—————

Notes

^[1] My research in Petra was generously funded through an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellowship.

^[2] Abu Saif al-Nasrat is a pseudonym, as are all of the names of people quoted in this article.

Nicolas Seth Reeves is pursuing a dual master’s degree in international development and political science from Sciences Po Paris and Freie Universität Berlin. His bachelor’s thesis (George Washington University) on the impact of state-led tourism development on tribal communities in Petra resulted in publications in the Oxford Middle East Review (2020), Columbia Journal of Politics and Society (2020), and Abhath al-Yarmouk: Humanities and Social Sciences (Arabic, 2022). Reeves spent a year in Egypt as a 2019–2020 Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Fellow at the American University in Cairo, where he completed native-level language courses in Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic literature, and Egyptian dialect. With the generous support of an ACOR-CAORC Fellowship, his research examines how pandemic-induced decreases in international visitors to Jordan impacted tourism-reliant communities living in the vicinity of Petra, Wadi Rum, and Umm Qais and how local, national, and international stakeholders influence strategies as these communities pursue and defend their political and economic interests.

The post Places and the Past: The Bidul, the Layathna, and Narratives about Indigeneity in Petra appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Many excellent studies have been published over the decades examining the impact of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on Palestinians’ lives, in the refugee camps, on relief efforts, with human development, in camp structures, and on politics with host countries, among other topics. Legal analyses have focused on the structure of UNWRA within the international refugee regime that developed in the years following World War II, as the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) came just a few years after Europe and the newly created United Nations were grappling with the massive demands posed by displaced persons around the world resulting from the war, decolonization, and regional conflicts. Absent from the scholarly record is a history of the legal relationship between UNRWA and the Jordanian government, which, in part, my project at the American Center of Research will begin to rectify by focusing on the following questions: How did legal and administrative agreements between the Jordanian government and UNRWA affect Palestinian citizen-refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in Jordan? What did the changing Jordanian legal landscape in the early 1950s mean for the country enforcing its national laws for Jordanian citizens, which at times included a party (UNRWA) to legislation that held diplomatic immunity in Jordan? How did the international context in which Jordan was not yet a member state of the United Nations affect Jordan’s enforcement of national law in court cases that involved UNRWA and its officials, who sometimes were also Palestinian citizen-refugees of Jordan?^[1]

As a ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow in summer 2023, I primarily searched in UNRWA’s Amman-based archives, particularly the central registry, for historical documentation during the 1948–1967 period, when Jordan ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While this period remains understudied in Jordan’s history, this project is a natural continuation of my earlier research: 1) in 1997–1998 I focused on Jordanian Jerusalem during this time in my doctoral dissertation (Katz 2005); and 2) while my second book, a critical edition of a World War II-era Palestinian diary, focused on the writing by a young man from Hebron during the British Mandate period, my current project extends the analysis of Hebron and its surrounding villages and refugee camps during the early 1950s, following the end of the British Mandate and the division of Palestine between the newly established Israel and the expanded Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. 

My efforts turned up documentation elucidating the administrative and legal relationship between the Jordanian government and UNRWA in correspondence between the sides, along with staff memos, reports, drafts of reports, legal documents, meeting notes, and other related materials. The central registry in UNRWA’s archives “contains records related to various legal and administrative matters pertaining to programs, agreements with governments and international organizations, and information about UNRWA personnel” (Tamari and Zureik 2001). The documents found during weeks of searching in the central registry will enhance my historical analysis of the legal relationship between UNRWA and the Jordanian government and the Jordanian legal system in the early years of the Palestinian refugee crisis and UNRWA’s existence. Having already discovered Jordanian arrest records from the Hebron District for the limited 1951–1953 period, which serve as a critical primary source, the project also focuses on Palestinians’ lived experiences in the Hebron District, under the legal and administrative frameworks established by Jordan and UNRWA after the 1948 war, both as refugees and as Jordanian citizens. The additional resources I found in UNRWA’s archive will undoubtedly expand my analysis of the legal circumstances of Palestinian citizen-refugees in Jordan from 1948–1967. 

My writing thus far has clarified how Jordan’s government enacted new laws for the post-1948 period in the unified kingdom (1950) and enforced laws on citizens, including Palestinian refugee-citizens, laws that also affected UNRWA, an extra-territorial international institution. Gathering historical sources for Jordan during the 1948–1967 period remains challenging, leaving this time in Jordan’s history and the history of Palestinian refugee-citizens in Jordan understudied. By turning to a broad range of historical sources, such as those available in UNRWA’s archives, historians can continue to expand historical knowledge during the early, challenging years in Jordan following its independence, while analyzing the aftermath of the seismic event of the Palestinian Nakba and the relationship that UNRWA had with the Jordanian government as the primary aid organization for Palestinian refugees.   

The UNRWA documentation will help clarify how UNRWA and Jordan dealt with legal issues from 1951 to1953. Much of the documentation in the central registry traces the nature of immunity and privileges for UNRWA employees (effectively international staff) included in the 1951 Jordan-UNRWA agreement, but it draws on the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. The issue of ration cards is also quite well documented in the UNRWA archives, mainly regarding the rolls of who had the right to a ration card and who did not. The precarious circumstances for Palestinian refugees during the post-1948 years led ration cards to become the source of criminal activity, and the crime registers include several cases of theft, forgery, and selling of stolen ration cards. In addition to the crime registers, the UNRWA archives include several cases, both criminal and civil, that are unusually well documented and stretch across the 1950s. Such cases can only add to our understanding of the intersection of legal issues between Jordan and UNRWA. 

References

Katz, Kimberly. 2005. Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Tamari, Salim and Elia Zureik. 2001. “UNRWA Archives on Palestinian Refugees.” In Reinterpreting the Historical Record: The Uses of Palestinian Refugee Archives for Social Science Research and Policy Analysis, edited by Salim Tamari and Elia Zureik, 25–60. Jerusalem: Institute for Jerusalem Studies.

^[1] Jordan was admitted to the United Nations on December 14, 1955.

Kimberly Katz is professor of Middle East history and coordinator of the Human Rights & History minor at Towson University in Maryland, focusing her research and teaching interests on social, cultural, colonial, and post-colonial history of the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has conducted research in Jordan, Palestine, Tunisia, and Egypt with the support of various fellowships, including from the Fulbright Program, Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), and the American Center of Research (ACOR). Her first book, Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces, was published in 2005 by the University Press of Florida. Her second book, A Young Palestinian’s Diary, 1941–1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2009 and in Arabic by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing (AIRP) in 2017.

The post Between Jordanian and International Law: UNRWA Involvement in Jordanian Court Cases, 1948–1967 appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Jordan’s low female labor force participation rate has long confounded policymakers, researchers, and activists. Despite achieving progress on several determinants of female labor force participation over the last decade, including increasing levels of female educational attainment, higher ages of marriage, and lower rates of fertility, less than 15 percent of women are actively engaged in the formal economy, as compared to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional average of 25 percent. Of the women that are actively engaged in the economy, more than a quarter of women are unemployed. There are several barriers to women’s economic participation in Jordan, including social norms, legal restrictions, available job opportunities, and a lack of safe, affordable, and adequate care infrastructure and transportation. 

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the already low economic participation for women and high unemployment rates in Jordan. During the pandemic, women were more likely to lose their jobs than men or leave the workforce due to additional unpaid care responsibilities. The loss of jobs comes with severe social impacts for women, as economic inequalities worsened by the pandemic have placed the most vulnerable groups of women at an even higher risk of violence. Despite the difficult situation, there is hope that an expansion of the digital economy and remote work opportunities that developed from or were strengthened during the pandemic may help to limit some of the barriers to women’s economic participation. Even before the pandemic began, the development community placed faith in the power of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to increase economic opportunity for women, as well as underserved communities, by connecting them to jobs and markets, overcoming restrictions to economic participation related to social norms, mobility, or time poverty.

Thanks to funding from the American Center of Research, I was able to conduct qualitative fieldwork in August and September 2021 to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic affected women’s economic participation through ICT-enabled work, with a particular focus on Jordanian women utilizing ICTs to support home-based businesses and micro-entrepreneurship, and work in the gig economy. This research builds on my earlier fieldwork (2018–2019) investigating whether and how ICTs help overcome constraints to female labor force participation in Jordan.

My earlier research found that Jordan is currently prioritizing women’s entrepreneurship initiatives for economic development and women’s empowerment. Government and donor initiatives have focused on supporting home-based businesses and micro-enterprises that utilize ICTs for selling goods and services online (including informal online commerce and e-commerce). Other initiatives have focused on additional forms of ICT-enabled work, such as connecting women to remote-based job opportunities (e.g., call centers). Finally, some entrepreneurship initiatives connected women to market opportunities in the gig economy through online platforms. 

I learned that many Jordanian women, given numerous constraints to their participation outside of the home, are interested in pursuing ICT-enabled work to generate income while working from home and that these new forms of economic participation are blurring the differences between formal and informal labor. My research also revealed that opportunities in ICT-enabled work could benefit families in intangible ways by increasing support for women’s economic participation and normalizing women’s engagement in the market. However, my research also found that differences in class, geography, and education play a substantial role in a women’s economic success with ICT-enabled work. 

During my ACOR fellowship, I conducted ethnographic research as a volunteer at the local nonprofit JoWomenomics and was involved in the day-to-day activities and research of an organization devoted to increasing the role of women in the economy in Jordan. I observed firsthand the activities around women’s economic participation and was grateful for an opportunity to engage with the local research community. In addition to ethnographic work, I conducted twelve interviews with heads of gig economy platforms, online commerce experts, home-based business advisors, and funders of international development organizations focused on supporting women’s entrepreneurship. These semi-structured interviews added significant insights into the state of women’s ICT-enabled work during the pandemic and its current recovery. 

My research revealed that women’s ICT-enabled home-based and micro-enterprises struggled throughout the pandemic, with a significant decrease in demand and revenue in informal online commerce. As female freelancers often enter the digital economy without any guarantee of future work, online financial opportunities were unstable and scarce in the midst of COVID-19. In addition to economic difficulties during the pandemic, women could not deliver goods and services due to the lockdowns. However, micro-, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) also have an essential role in pandemic recovery. Informants shared several ways to support women’s ICT-enabled home-based and micro-enterprises. They expressed a need to move enterprises from informal online commerce fully into e-commerce by connecting businesses to export markets and providing training on how to conduct global e-commerce (e.g., Amazon). There is also a need to support women to formalize and strengthen their businesses by helping them integrate their products and services into high-potential value chains.

My research also found that while the gig economy can provide market opportunities for women, there were clear winners and losers during the pandemic. Like other businesses in retail, hospitality, and the services sector, several platforms in those sectors were unable to operate during the pandemic, limiting income-generating activities for women. Even more, the environmental challenges of remote work were higher for female employees due to conflicting roles — employee, daughter, wife, mother, housewife, etc. — presented by at-home work. However, informants shared that online platforms that helped connect women, and others, to remote work opportunities, such as technology and programming, graphics and design, business and consulting, etc., were able to grow. As the pandemic drags on, the advancement of remote work platforms has been paralleled by schools becoming more adept at operating under health restrictions, easing the burden of childcare on women.

Finally, my fieldwork found that although the pandemic exacerbated already low levels of women’s economic participation, it also accelerated the shift towards ICT-enabled work and the digital economy. Several informants shared how local businesses were digitalizing quickly at the start of the pandemic, finding ways to adapt their business and employment practices. One study found that 82% of Jordanian firms would or might adopt more remote-work practices. As government and other stakeholders increasingly recognize the need to transition to the digital economy, a key opportunity is presented for investment in women’s technological training, literacy, and participation. If inclusion is prioritized by providing women with tools of digital upskilling, there is potential to decrease economic, cultural, and educational barriers to female labor force participation, simultaneously responding to the global, digital shift in work.

Allison J. Anderson researches, teaches, and consults on gender, economic development, digital development, socioeconomics, and the Middle East. In 2020, Allison earned a PhD focused on women’s economic participation and entrepreneurship based on fieldwork as a Fulbright Research Fellow in Jordan. Previously, Allison was an associate program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where she focused on strategic planning and engagement in the Office of the President for Global Health. Prior to this, Allison worked as a strategy consultant in Deloitte’s Government and Public Services practice. Early in her career, she served two years in the U.S. Peace Corps in rural Jordan. Anderson holds a PhD in international studies from the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies, an MA in international relations and international economics from the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a BA in political science and Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Michigan.

The post Jordanian Women and the Digital Economy During COVID-19 appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

With support from an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellowship, I conducted dissertation fieldwork on Amman’s graffiti/street art scene from May to August 2021. During this period of on-site fieldwork, I attended art exhibitions, observed graffiti/street art painting sessions, participated in walking tours of Amman’s public art scene, and conducted semiformal interviews with artists, curators, NGO employees, and figures within the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM). 

My proposed project set out to understand how young graffiti/street artists use art to construct and mobilize imaginations of the ideal future of Amman while working within and outside networks of state and institutional patronage of public art. Much of the current literature describes youth cultural production as inherently anti-government or status quo. This framing of youth art practices is particularly prevalent in scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa region, since such practices helped energize the massive protest movements of 2010–2011. During the initial stages of my research, I was intrigued by how, in contrast to this scholarship, Amman graffiti/street artists almost exclusively reject any association of their work with “politics.” They instead attempt to build a robust arts scene and pursue careers while not crossing any of the country’s “red lines” of expression and by working closely with state and non-state institutions such as GAM, corporations, NGOs, and humanitarian organizations on public art initiatives. Beyond rigid definitions of graffiti/street art as either resistant to or complicit with dominant institutions and norms, my work aims to better understand how graffiti/street art practices both reflect and reconstitute prominent narratives, experiences, and power relations of and in Amman, particularly with regard to youth and young adults.

My work contributes to a growing body of scholarship on color politics and aims to draw attention to the crucial role of color for activating people’s relationships with one another and their environments. Throughout my fieldwork, graffiti/street artists and arts practitioners regularly mentioned the distinct value of public art in the city through negative aesthetic judgments of Amman’s monochromatic beige cityscape (Fig. 1). Artists often invoked Amman’s “lack of color” (Fig. 2) as a starting point for sharing their views on a wide range of the city’s perceived inadequacies—such as, in their view, its small arts and cultural scene, its lack of water and green spaces, or its poor infrastructure.^[1] Through references to monochromaticity, my interlocutors also linked urban aesthetics with narratives of Amman as an “empty” or “boring” city (Fig. 3) lacking economic opportunity (Jordan’s youth unemployment rate is around 50%) and spaces for youth leisure and creative expression. 

Conversely, my interlocutors would describe multichromatic public art as a key component of not only building a more visually pleasing Amman but also for enhancing positive communal relations and affects and for creating more economic opportunities for young cultural producers. In other words, ideas about the positive value and potential of multichromatic art help shape utopian visions of artist-built futures and social orders. Furthermore, young cultural producers often thought that colorful graffiti/street art production would help give a distinct identity to Amman while challenging longstanding stereotypes of the city as a cultural backwater. These views show that graffiti/street art is centrally linked to young people’s frustrations as well as their deep affections for the city. Furthermore, my observations echo the insights of anthropologist and former ACOR-CAORC fellow Aseel Sawalha, who describes how art and cultural production is a primary context shaping peoples’ identifications with Amman as Ammanis rather than as members of communities rooted to other locations throughout Jordan and the MENA region. 

My dissertation research also pivots from visual-centric studies of art and examines how the experiences of producing graffiti/street art bolster ideas about the potential of art for constructing an ideal future Amman. I focus on daylong painting sessions among groups of artists as periods in which a confluence of artists’ intimate relations with urban material, positive interactions with passersby, and improvised rap and breakdancing performances temporarily transform Amman from what my interlocutors claim is a boring and routine space into a lively, unpredictable place. On the one hand, group painting sessions accentuate feelings of liminality and an acutely felt discord between the daily struggles of present Amman and an imagined future city where colorful art and the collective joy associated with producing it abound. On the other hand, these painting sessions underscore the ways young cultural producers understand their work as expressions of love and care for Amman that strengthen communal bonds. By focusing on the motivating qualities of Amman’s “slow” and “boring” temporality, I underscore how artists’ desire for open spaces of leisure and creativity free from controversy or problems with state authorities play an important role in their adherence to limits on public artistic expression. 

As commonly happens to anthropologists, during fieldwork my research scope and scale expanded somewhat. First, while in Amman I became interested in public art in the refugee camps built in response to the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967. Public murals are ubiquitous in some of these camps, yet this art is not widely considered part of Amman’s graffiti/street art “scene.” Furthermore, this wall art is unlike the colorful blue, orange, purple, and turquoise artworks in non-camp spaces that are typically devoid of any overt sociopolitical message and often receive funding from municipal authorities and NGOs. Through murals consisting primarily of the colors green, brown, red, and black, residents of Palestinian camp spaces in Jordan emphasize Palestinians’ “rootedness” to historic Palestine, express hope in the right of return, show solidarity with Palestinians struggling against Israel’s military occupation and settler-colonial project, and explicitly establish the camp as a camp (as opposed to a de facto or future Palestinian state). My dissertation compares public art worlds in camp and non-camp spaces to highlight how various relationships to color, space, and time produce, maintain, or render porous symbolic and material borders throughout the city. 

My fieldwork also revealed critical intersections of humanitarian intervention and public art in Jordan. One of my research activities involved observing projects from the NGO Artolution and their partner organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF. Artolution primarily works with groups of children who are experiencing economic marginalization or have had traumatic experiences, such as Syrian refugees. For these projects, teams of artists who reside in the Azraq camp for displaced Syrians or other locales in Jordan run workshops with children about mixing colors and expressing one’s hopes, fears, and traumas. The teams then collectively paint a mural representing the ideas expressed by the group. For this dissertation, I explore how initiatives by groups such as Artolution are crucial sites in which young Jordan-based artists develop their views about art’s value and capacity for positively intervening in the lives of those closely impacted by issues such as economic inequality and the regional refugee crisis. I intend to draw on insights from this fieldwork to develop my next research project investigating the impact of arts and cultural initiatives in Jordan’s refugee camp spaces. 

Data collection for this dissertation is complete and I am in the early stages of analyzing my data and writing up my findings. I intend to defend my dissertation in spring 2023. 

^[1] Such discussions echoed insights from scholars such as Seteney Shami (2007), who note that residents and visitors alike often describe Amman as a site of absence and dislocation, particularly in relation to regional capitals such as Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus. 

References

Shami, Seteney. 2007. “Amman Is Not a City: Middle Eastern Cities in Question.” In Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, edited by Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender, 208–236. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kyle Benedict Craig is a doctoral candidate studying anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. Before coming to Northwestern, Kyle earned a BA in anthropology from the University of Washington and an MA in sociocultural anthropology from Michigan State University. Kyle has published writing in outlets such as Artmejo, the Arab Image Foundation, The Islamic Monthly, and Ibraaz. In addition to writing his dissertation on the graffiti/street art scene in Amman, Kyle is currently curating an open-access series on political aesthetics within right-wing, authoritarian, and populist movements as a digital editorial fellow with Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).

The post Ethnographic Research on Graffiti/Street Art, Youth, and Urban Space in Amman appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

In 2020, ACOR hosted a two-week faculty seminar in Jordan called “Sustainability at the Margins,” co-sponsored with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). The seminar explored the opportunities and challenges Jordan is facing as one of the most water-poor countries in the world, with a growing population and a fragile economy. I was fortunate to be one of twelve U.S. college and university faculty selected to participate in the program. As a professor of religious studies, I was excited to be hosted by an institute known for its involvement in archaeology and its insights into ancient customs, beliefs, and practices. I was particularly interested in sustainability issues related to researching and preserving ancient cultural sites. I also had a strong interest in Jordan. Every semester I teach a college survey course about world religions, and we discuss how different countries handle religious diversity among its citizens and with other nations. Jordan is a predominantly Muslim country with a significant Christian minority and an influential indigenous tribal network. In 2010, King Abdullah of Jordan proposed the World Interfaith Harmony Week at the United Nations, which continues to be celebrated worldwide every year (United Nations n.d.).

Our seminar was led by Dr. Barbara Porter, then director of ACOR, and Dr. Jack Green, who at the time was ACOR’s associate director. Their knowledge of archaeology and Jordan, their contacts within the country, and their support of our research and teaching interests made this one of the best faculty seminars I have attended. The faculty cohort came from different academic disciplines, and other members of our team have posted excellent articles on topics related to their fields of expertise. Because my research specialty is sacred art, I thought it would be interesting to focus on a cross design we saw at the archeological site of Umm el-Jimal (Umm al-Jimal). This article is a case study about sustainable tourism in Jordan as well as a demonstration of how faculty seminars stimulate academic research and reflection.

The Umm el-Jimal Project

We began the seminar in the capital city of Amman, where ACOR is located. During these first few days, there were lectures and activities to orient us to Jordan’s culture and history. At ACOR I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Bert de Vries, who championed the Umm el-Jimal Project. His interest in the site began on his first trip to Jordan in 1968. He was a novice architect working on another project when he visited Umm el-Jimal and became intrigued by multistory ancient ruins located in the middle of a modern village (de Vries n.d.). In 1972, he received a grant to map the site, and the Jordanian government designated the archaeological ruins as officially protected. Soon de Vries was excavating at Umm el-Jimal with teams that included his students from Calvin College in the United States and local workers. 

From the beginning, de Vries’ vision always included sustainable tourism. Umm el-Jimal is located in one of the rural “poverty pockets” of Jordan with high illiteracy and poverty rates (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 2014). Because of limited opportunities, young people leave the village for employment and higher education in the cities. This population shift from rural villages to urban centers is a trend across Jordan, but it is particularly acute in the governorate of Mafraq, where Umm el-Jimal is located. De Vries understood that sustainable tourism at Umm el-Jimal could provide ongoing economic opportunity for the local community, with the archaeological site as its anchor. It also meant approaching tourist development in a way that would neither overuse scarce resources such as water nor erase the local culture that made the area unique. 

The Umm el-Jimal Project has continued to pursue these two goals of archaeological research and sustainable tourism for over five decades. Under the aegis of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, it has received funding from various sources, including UNESCO and UN Women, as well as ACOR’s USAID-funded Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP) (United States Agency for International Development 2019). The decades of work have produced results, and in 2018 the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities prepared the file to submit Umm el-Jimal to UNESCO for consideration as a World Heritage site (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 2018).

Our seminar’s first excursion outside Amman was to Umm el-Jimal (Fig. 1). The ninety-minute drive revealed how far the urban density of the capital has extended. Eventually the city gives way to open vistas with occasional Bedouin tents. Along the route there are a handful of rural towns supporting industrial plants, military installations, and refugee settlements. The village of Umm el-Jimal is just a few miles off the highway. The main roads are paved, and the ruins stand in the village center. 

Our tour began at a visitor center designed by Ammar Khammash, a famous Jordanian architect known for his sustainable-tourism projects. On the outside, the deceptively simple buildings are built with local black basalt stone that blends in with the ruins. An open courtyard greets visitors with a panoramic view of the site. Inside the complex is a museum with signage in Arabic and English.

Our tour guide was a knowledgeable and confident young woman. Samar Erman (Figs. 2–3) grew up in the village of Umm el-Jimal and became certified as a tour guide, a relatively new profession for women in Jordan. At university she studied tour guiding and management information systems. She is fluent in English, French, and Arabic. Desiring to make a life in the village where multiple generations of her family of the Masa’eed tribe had lived for almost a century, Ms. Erman returned to Umm el-Jimal to help her hometown revitalize and thrive. The site steward for the archaeological project also accompanied us on the tour. Jehad Suliman (Fig. 2) also grew up in the village, and he shared stories of playing among the ruins before majoring in architecture at university. He has been working for the Umm el-Jimal Project since 2017.

During the site tour, we learned that ancient Umm el-Jimal developed over three distinct periods. In the first period, from the mid-1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE, it was as a Nabataean-early-Roman community situated along a caravan trading route. In the 4th–5th centuries CE, it became a Roman military station with additional buildings that fortified the empire’s frontier. From the 5th to 8th centuries, Umm el-Jimal slowly developed into a prosperous Byzantine-Umayyad farming and trading town. The site was abruptly abandoned when an earthquake destroyed the infrastructure in 749 CE. For the next thousand years, only occasional nomadic communities inhabited the ruins. 

The ruins were largely undisturbed, which was ideal for archaeological exploration. Despite the 8th-century earthquake and the subsequent centuries of erosion, there were many multistoried structures still extant. Umm el-Jimal architecture relied almost entirely on stone for its construction. We saw a stone external staircase built into a stone wall (Fig. 3). There were also full-size solid stone doors built to rest on stone hinges. One such door was still in place in its doorframe. I was astonished that even I could open a multi-ton stone door by myself! In addition, there was evidence of cisterns and developed water irrigation systems that allowed the community to farm and live in tight-knit neighborhood enclaves.

The importance of religion for Umm el-Jimal inhabitants was evident. In the museum, we saw recovered religious statues, jewelry, and stone inscriptions honoring the earliest inhabitants’ Nabatean and Roman gods. During the site tour, most of the religious evidence was from the Byzantine era. Sixteen churches have been uncovered for a city with only 150 houses. In addition, seven or eight smaller churches were built into dense neighborhoods, suggesting private worship, with larger churches at the periphery for more public worship. All the churches face east and feature an elevated space for the priest and a larger central gathering space, sometimes with side aisles and arches. Floors and walls were covered in white plaster, and some churches included colorful mosaics on the floor. There is also evidence of changing liturgical practices in the late 6th century, when some churches remodeled to add a 1-meter marble altar screen to partition the sacred space of the priest from the public space. 

The Umm el-Jimal Cross

Our tour ended at a large church on the western boundary of the ruins labeled “Western Church” on the site map (Figs. 1, 4). The building is two stories high with arched columns, a separate baptistry, three aisles, and an elevated church altar. It also has a mosaic floor. Ms. Erman made sure that we saw a particular cross design that was carved into a stone pillar (Figs. 4, 5). She said it was unique at the site because none of the other fifteen churches at Umm el-Jimal have this cross, and as far as she knew the design had yet to be found in other Byzantine churches. I was intrigued! Was it possible we were seeing a Byzantine cross design that was only now being rediscovered? Even if the cross was replicated elsewhere, it was interesting to ruminate on the unusual design of this religious art. 

In terms of the academic study of sacred art, cross designs are one way to map Christian theological understandings, as well as to document debates in Christian belief and practice. I found it fascinating to see a cross design that might expand our knowledge about religion and art during the Byzantine era. In the museum, a picture of the cross identified it generically as a Byzantine cross roundel. In casual conversation, however, it was already being referred to as the “Umm el-Jimal cross.” Perhaps the design would become famous one day! When Ms. Erman ended the formal tour, the rest of the group departed, but I stayed behind to explore the church further. Ms. Erman and Mr. Suliman stayed with me and provided more information about the church. Their enthusiasm, appreciation, and knowledge of the site fed my own interest as they shared more details and answered my questions.

In terms of design, the cross has arms of equal length, which is typical for Byzantine crosses, but it does not include the common Byzantine embellishment of flared ends. The straight lines of the cross are contained within a circle but do not touch the edges. This feature creates the effect that the cross is raised, but in fact the illusion was created by carving out the negative space around it. The designer made the design even more intricate by carving smaller versions of the same cross-within-a-circle design in each of the four quadrants created by the main cross. The smaller crosses were made by reverse method, keeping the negative space raised and carving out the cross within them. The smaller crosses are not an exact match of the larger one, as the ends of the smaller crosses touch the edges of their circles. 

I liked the design as soon as I saw it. The cross caught my attention because of its intricacy and because it included design elements familiar to me but combined in new ways. It reminded me of the so-called Jerusalem cross, which includes four small crosses in each quadrant of a larger cross, but the Jerusalem cross does not include circles (Seymour 1898, 364). The circles also reminded me of a Celtic cross, although the circle in a Celtic cross is within the cross itself and originally served a structural purpose to support cross arms when large freestanding versions were built out of stone (Werner 1990). The design of a cross within a circle is also reminiscent of Native American medicine wheels (Liebmann 2002).

I was not surprised that I connected what I saw with other designs as circles and crossed straight lines are found in religious and cultural symbols around the world, including independent of Christianity. The examples I recalled were just my initial points of reference. As I continued to reflect on why I was drawn to this cross at Umm el-Jimal, I had to admit I just liked it. I found the design aesthetically pleasing, as it appeared to have an equal balance of crosses and circles. Only later was it pointed out that there was an additional cross carved into the middle of the main cross with the same carving technique used to create the smaller crosses. Whether intentional or not, theological meaning can be inferred from these connections between the large and small crosses.

It is also interesting that this cross design was repeated multiple times around the church. Ms. Erman and Mr. Suliman pointed out where this design had been carved into pillars and archways. Many of these crosses are weathered and worn, but the unique features of multiple crosses and circles can still be identified. Many of these crosses are small and could easily be overlooked if you do not look up to see them. Because of their locations, the crosses appeared to be more decorative than a focus for worship.

It made me wonder who designed it, carved it, and sponsored it? The design is intricate and required specialized carving skills and time to make. I was intrigued. Why did they spend the extra time and effort? Did someone want to leave their personal mark on the grandest church at Umm el-Jimal? Who was behind this work? Was it a patron who paid for the work? Or was it a cross designer with more latitude (because it appeared more decorative than liturgical)? Or perhaps it was a carver who wanted to showcase their talent? All of this was whimsical speculation, but one thing was certain — someone really liked the design! Whether it was a patron, an architect, a designer, or a carver — someone found the cross design pleasing enough to repeat, repeat, repeat.

When it was time to rejoin the seminar group at the bus, I found that many of my colleagues had purchased handmade souvenirs carved from the local black basalt stone at a women’s co-op across the street. (By the time I arrived, all that was left were larger stone bowls that seemed too heavy for the remainder of my travels.) This is a good example of sustainable tourism, as the souvenirs are made from an abundant local material. The co-op provides income for villagers while preserving a local cultural heritage of stone carving and enhancing the tourist experience at Umm el-Jimal.

I was delighted to learn that Mr. Suliman and Ms. Erman have a sustainable tourism project of their own. They are two of four partners in a company called Hand by Hand Heritage, which was established with the aid of ACOR’s SCHEP. All four founders are younger, college-educated residents of Umm el-Jimal. They had chosen the name Hand by Hand to express their desire to help their village, and their website (handbyhandheritage.com) is professional and comprehensive. Their tourist services include homestays, archaeological site tours, food, and drink. They also offer interactive tourist experiences such as carving basalt, cooking local cuisine, experiencing a Bedouin evening, and camping in the Azraq Desert. You can also rent bicycles, with or without a guide. A statement on the Hand by Hand website echoes conversations I had with Ms. Erman and Mr. Suliman:

When we were younger, there were only two types of jobs available in our village: women became teachers, men went to the army. And if we didn’t choose one of these, we would have to move out of our home. [….] Our dream is to preserve the site while economically lifting our local community. [….] We support one another, together (Hand By Hand Heritage n.d.).

Our seminar group was treated to a Hand by Hand experience with a meal prepared and served in the traditional style by a local family in their home (Fig. 6). In keeping with the Hand by Hand orientation, the experience was not just enjoying food but also engaging with members of the family about their way of life. As we drove back to Amman, I had a better understanding of what sustainable tourism looks like in practice. I was also inspired to see a younger generation from Umm el-Jimal developing sustainable tourism with respect and caring for their community and cultural heritage.

Byzantine Mosaics and the Role of the Artist

After our day excursion to Umm el-Jimal, our team prepared for a more extended trip to other Jordanian archaeological and cultural sites. In Madaba, I was fascinated by the oldest map of the holy land built with mosaics into the floor of a Greek Orthodox church (Fig. 7). Dated to the 6th century, the map was rediscovered in the 19th century during a church renovation. We were fortunate to have esteemed archaeologists interact with us during the seminar to expand our understanding of what we were seeing. Dr. Konstantinos Politis told me the Madaba mosaic map is surprisingly accurate and actually helped him to locate Lot’s Cave (or, to be more exact, the cave identified by early Christians as the cave where Lot and his daughters hid, as described in the biblical book of Genesis) when he discovered a 7th-century church built in front of the cave site. Not only was it interesting to learn firsthand how ancient maps have helped modern archaeologists do their work, but it was also exciting to meet the people who have used these maps and have made such major discoveries in our lifetime.

Many of the most beautiful and elaborate mosaics we saw were of animals, plants, and human forms representing the seasons. Such mosaics are often found inside Byzantine-era churches, and they seem more aligned with nature-based religions than early Christian understandings. I had the opportunity to discuss the topic with archaeologist, historian, and Byzantine mosaic expert Dr. Robert Schick, who explained to me that the Byzantine era was a time of transition. Religious beliefs often changed quickly, either through conversion, military conquests, or emperors’ edicts. What patrons and artists found aesthetically pleasing, however, as well as what artisans knew how to make, often changed more slowly. Mosaic makers would already have had the patterns for nature symbols. If patrons enjoyed the designs, and they were paying for the most expensive floor material (mosaics) for a new church, it is understandable how these designs would be approved. As for Christian clergy, it was conceivable that they may have been less concerned about what appeared on the floor than on the altar.

Discussions with these archaeologists expanded my own understandings and highlighted the importance of studying sacred art. The field of religious studies is often text based, and texts privilege educated religious authorities. When certain written texts become “the” tradition, it is hard to know what ordinary people really believed and practiced. Luckily, the perspectives of non-religious specialists, including artists and financial patrons, can still be inferred from the art they created and endowed. These archaeological discoveries help us to see what was important to others besides official scribes and leaders, and they introduce alternative perspectives about belief and practice. The expression of status based on materials used, practical concerns of artistic craftsmen, and the social norms of beauty are important considerations. I am very grateful for the Umm el-Jimal site visit. There is something profound about experiencing a recent discovery of religious art in its physical context, as well as developing scholarly inquiry based on what I am seeing. Having these first-hand experiences augmented by conversations with experts from related fields has had a lasting influence on my scholarship.

Petra, Wadi Rum, and Challenges to Sustainable Tourism

The archaeological site of Petra is the most visited tourist attraction in Jordan, and it is truly magnificent (Fig. 8). We were privileged to be guided by ACOR archaeologists who were actively involved in its ongoing research and documentation. Petra spans historical periods similar to those of Umm el-Jimal (Nabatean, Roman, and Byzantine), but on a significantly grander scale. Petra was the capital of the Nabatean kingdom and a major trading location, and the ruins stretch over 102 square miles. When sea transport became preferable to land in the early Islamic period, the importance of Petra diminished and much of the population left. Similar to Umm el-Jimal, the Petra ruins remained largely undisturbed for more than a millennium.

Because of its enormous popularity, Petra has competing interests that challenge its sustainability. In 1994, UNESCO issued a 300-page report describing the harm caused by unrestricted mass tourism (Powell 1994). In 2007, tourism dramatically increased when Petra was named one of the Seven New Wonders of the World. The government’s official tourist statistics show a staggering 2,500% increase in tourists from 1984 to 2019 (Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority n.d.). While many maintain that Petra cannot support this accelerated growth, tourism is critically important for the economy of the nation. Jordan is a Middle Eastern country with little oil or other natural resources, and efforts to manage Petra’s tourist growth have been met with resistance. Unsustainable development, however, threatens what makes Petra worth visiting.

Tourism is not the only challenge to sustainable tourism. Once ancient ruins have been discovered by archaeologists, or even before, the sites become targets for looters. When looters remove artifacts for profit, the objects disappear and the knowledge gained from analyzing them in their physical context is lost forever. The environment is also a challenge. After excavation, a site is exposed to natural elements that contribute to its disintegration. Graffiti can also be a problem. We saw this when we visited the spectacular Wadi Rum Desert. Two hundred and eighty square miles of Wadi Rum have been designated as protected wilderness, and they contain significant petroglyphic art. These ancient images tell the stories of those who lived in this barren desert, and they remain largely unprotected. [In 2021, ACOR received a grant from National Geographic to employ drones to monitor vandalism and illegal excavation in Wadi Rum. —Ed.]

Visiting the petroglyphs at Wadi Rum made me feel at home. I teach in the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, in the southwestern United States, and we have significant ancient rock art left by the Hohokam people who once lived here. I am well aware of damage caused by people carving their initials into these rocks as well as by other forms of vandalism. Unfortunately, the many petroglyphs and other archaeological sites of Wadi Rum have also suffered from graffiti.

Scholars from my hometown of Phoenix have contributed to developing techniques to remove graffiti from petroglyphs in Jordan. The ACOR team knew my colleague, Niccole Cerveny, a professor of geography and sustainability, who wrote her graduate thesis on petroglyph restoration and has been to Jordan as an advisor on graffiti removal at Wadi Rum. [To learn more about this work, see Groom and Bevan 2020. —Ed.] To be standing in the Wadi Rum Desert with Mohammed Domayan, the WRPA (Wadi Rum Protected Area) antiquities supervisor, as he sent personal greetings back to my colleague in Arizona was both surreal and heartwarming. And it wasn’t the only connection. When our seminar team visited Dr. Ahmad Majdoubeh at the University of Jordan, I presented him with a letter from another colleague, English professor Lufti Hussein, who wanted to express his gratitude for his Jordanian college mentor. Even I was able to connect with a scholar who had presented at our college the previous year and who hosted me for dinner at her home when our seminar team was in Aqaba. Everyone in our group had their own special moments interacting with those we met in Jordan. Friendships were forged, academic collaborations were initiated, and cross-cultural student projects were designed. As we prepared to return to the United States, all of us expressed a desire to return to Jordan.

Reflections

The CAORC-ACOR “Sustainability at the Margins” seminar took place on January 2–17, 2020. Our seminar group never expected that we would be the last group hosted by ACOR for the remainder of the year and beyond. The COVID-19 virus soon became a global pandemic. On March 17, the country of Jordan shut down its borders and airports, and ACOR sent staff home. Bustling Jordanian tourist sites became dormant, and the economic downturn for the country was acute. The same was true in the United States, although the USA has more resources and is not as dependent on tourism for its economy. My college closed its campuses mid-March 2020 and reverted to all-online teaching for our 18,000 students. It is now 2021 and my college has reopened its campus for all teaching subjects. Tourism in Jordan has also opened again, although the pandemic continues. It is a privilege to finally be writing my reflections about this incredible experience. 

I wrote this article to show my appreciation for the CAORC-ACOR seminar. Faculty seminars such as these can inspire scholars and teachers in ways that are impossible to predict. I am grateful for this faculty development experience hosted by an institute as esteemed as ACOR. I now have a deeper appreciation for the many complexities and challenges archaeologists face while doing their work, as well as how related fields contribute to my own field of study.

My deep thanks to Dr. Barbara Porter, whose leadership directed ACOR for fourteen years. She told us in Jordan that ours would be the last group she hosted before retiring and returning to the United States. Our faculty seminar benefited from the culmination of her experience, knowledge, and wisdom. I also want to thank Dr. Jack Green, who was associate director of ACOR while we were there. I am grateful to Dr. Konstantinos Politis and Dr. Robert Schick, who both helped me understand the importance of artisans and artisan workshops for creating the religious symbols we see today, and to Samar Erman and Jehad Suliman for showing me what sustainable tourism looks like in action.

I hope this article raises interest among scholars who have knowledge of other Byzantine crosses similar in design to the Umm el-Jimal cross. In addition, perhaps Hand by Hand Heritage or the Umm el-Jimal Women’s Co-op might consider producing replicas to sell either locally or online. If others respond to the cross design as I have, it might have strong appeal and offer something unique that could help in publicizing the Umm el-Jimal Project. I would welcome the opportunity to stay involved in any ongoing efforts as they develop.

I am delighted that Dr. Pearce Paul Creasman, the current ACOR director, has successfully spearheaded renovation of the center and that it is again hosting scholars. [At the time of writing, ACOR’s library and archives remain closed to the public. —Ed.]

Finally, it was an honor to meet Bert de Vries, the champion of the Umm el-Jimal Project. Once I was home, he kindly responded to follow-up questions I had about the site. My last email with him was in December 2020. I was saddened to learn that he passed away in March 2021 after dedicating over fifty years of his life and scholarship to Umm el-Jimal. He demonstrated what a difference one person can make to expand knowledge of ancient communities while helping contemporary ones. May this article about sustainable tourism be one of the many tributes to his memory and legacy.

Elizabeth Ursic is a professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at Mesa Community College in Phoenix, Arizona. She is author of Women, Ritual, and Power: Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship. Her essay “Christian Feminist Theology and the Arts” appears in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion and Art, and her chapter on musical metaphors is forthcoming in an Oxford University Press book series on music and Christian theology. She holds an MDiv from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and a PhD in religious studies from Arizona State University. She co-chairs the American Academy of Religion Women’s Caucus. Her research interests include religion, imagination, the arts, and gender. For more information, visit her website.

References

De Vries, Bert. n.d. “Director’s Welcome: A Letter from Bert de Vries.” Umm El-Jimal Project.

Groom, Kaelin M. and George Bevan. 2020. “Wadi Rum: Community-Based Rock Art and Epigraphic Recording (2018–2019).”Archaeology in Jordan 2: 142–143

Hand By Hand Heritage. n.d. “Our Story.” HandByHandheritage.com.

Liebmann, Matthew. 2002. “Demystifying the Big Horn Medicine Wheel: A Contextual Analysis of Meaning, Symbolism, and Function.” Plains Anthropologist 47, no. 180: 61–71.

Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority. n.d. “Petra Visitors Statistics 1984–2019.” VisitPetra.jo.

Powell, Nicholas 1994. “Petra Is Suffering from Mass Tourism.” Originally published as “The Rose Red City Wears Away.” The Art Newspaper, 29 September 1994.

Seymour, William Wood. 1898. The Cross in Tradition, History and Art. London: Putnam and Sons.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 2014. “Cultural Heritage Celebration at Umm el-Jimal.”UNESCO.org.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 2018. “Umm el-Jimal.” UNESCO Tentative Lists.

United Nations. n.d. “World Interfaith Harmony Week, February 1–7.” UN.org.

United States Agency for International Development. 2019. “Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project.” USAID.gov, accessed 26 July 2021.

Werner, Martin. 1990. “On the Origin of the Form of the Irish High Cross.” Gesta 29 (1): 98–110, doi:10.2307/767104.

The post Sustainable Tourism and the Cross at Umm el-Jimal appeared first on ACOR Jordan.