During my time as an undergraduate, I enrolled in a course called “Technology in Prehistoric Periods.” At 19, the word “technology” still made me think of computers, but I signed up out of curiosity. Prof. Maysoon Al-Nahar introduced us to the fascinating world of stone tool technology using Neolithic assemblages from Tell Abu Suwwan (ASW) (Fig. 1). That course gave me my first encounter with a real prehistoric stone tool—a moment I still remember vividly. 

Years later, after I completed my master’s research, which focused on the African Middle Stone Age (c. 300,000–30,000 years ago), Prof. Al-Nahar invited me back to the University of Jordan to assist with her ongoing analysis of ASW (Fig. 2). Alongside other students, I helped sort and study thousands of stone artifacts. Among them, one type of flake caught my attention: It showed removals from its ventral surface, a practice not common at most prehistoric sites. These “cores-on-flakes” (COFs) were flakes originally removed from a core for everyday use—but here they were reused as cores themselves, creating more flakes (Fig. 3). It reminded me of repurposing a cookie tin to store needles and thread—but happening thousands of years ago. I decided to investigate this phenomenon further. I applied to the American Center of Research for funding in 2023 and was initially rejected, but I successfully received support in 2025 for my project “Stone Tool Optimization and Recycling Mechanisms in Tell Abu Suwwan (STORM).”

For the STORM project I examined 500 artifacts and worked in collaboration with Ruaa Al-Athamneh, a master of arts student, resulting in a combined dataset of 1,232 artifacts. Research took place at the University of Jordan, using both technological and typological approaches. Our main question was whether these cores-on-flakes represent deliberate recycling or a standard reduction strategy at ASW—a site located just meters from abundant raw material. Based on previous studies, one might not expect recycling at a site with such readily available stone, which made the investigation particularly intriguing.

Our analysis revealed that COFs were mostly created from reduction “waste” rather than formal cores. Size did not matter much. These flakes were selected to produce small, functional flakes—rarely more than two removals per flake. The resulting flakes were tiny, often less than 2 cm long, with minimal shaping or preparation. It seems the people at ASW were focused on quickly producing small cutting tools from existing materials rather than investing much time and effort.

The results show early humans deliberately recycling their stone tools. Even in a landscape where raw material was abundant, the knappers at ASW found ways to make the most of what they already had. Rather than creating a wasteful surplus, they turned old flakes into new tools—demonstrating ingenuity, adaptability, and resourcefulness. In other words, the COFs reflect a deliberate, flexible strategy for meeting everyday needs.

The outcomes of the STORM project are being prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. Finally, I would like to sincerely thank the American Center of Research for funding this project, which made it possible to carry out the research and investigate these aspects of Neolithic life at Tell Abu Suwwan.

Osama Samawi is the 2025–2026 S. Thomas Parker Memorial Fund Fellow. He is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior (ICArEHB) at the University of Algarve, Portugal, where he researches the Middle and Later Stone Age in Mozambique. His work focuses on experimental knapping, lithic techno-economics, and the human-environment nexus during the Middle Stone Age. He is also engaged in research projects on the Middle Stone Age in Jordan, South Africa, and Oman.

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Prior to this field school, my only archaeological experience and exposure came from classes I had taken at the University of Alberta, volunteer work I had done with one of my professors, and travels I had taken with my family. Never once had I stepped foot on a site intending to contribute to its archaeological knowledge—until now. After spending three weeks at the Humayma Archaeological Field School in Jordan under the supervision of Prof. Craig A. Harvey, I have become better equipped to understand the nuanced processes and work involved in modern archaeology. This is especially true for instances in which archaeological surveying unexpectedly uncovers discoveries which require adjustments to the work. Through my time spent at the American Center of Research (ACOR) and at the archaeological site of Humayma, I developed valuable skills in photography, photogrammetry, and writing site reports. These “hard” skills were complemented by the “soft” skills I also cultivated during my time in Jordan. These included establishing positive relationships with the Bedouin people and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities to help protect the site of al-Humayma against looting. All in all, my time spent under the Jordanian sun was both mentally and physically stimulating, and I could not have asked for a better first experience at an archaeological field school.

Before going into the field, I spent a week at ACOR, examining materials found at al-Humayma from previous seasons, which contributed tremendously to my ability to both understand the site and work meaningfully at it. From late Nabataean fine ware to African red slip, and from stone cooking ware to terracotta pipes, it was through these materials and lectures (both formal and informal) that I gained a greater understanding of the site’s history and the artifacts found there. I am a very hands-on person, and I tend to retain information much better when I can see, hold, and feel in real time what it is I am learning about. If it were not for the lessons on these materials, I would not have had the ability to examine objects at al-Humayma so easily and discern a cup base from a perfume bottle rim—a skill I had no idea I could hone in just two weeks!

My fond experiences examining the material artifacts also extended to photography and photogrammetry. As Matthew Vincent, project director at ACOR, would often say, “The future of archaeology is in 3D modules.” Through him, I learned about real-time kinematic positioning (RTK), how to use it in the field to improve the accuracy of data from global navigation satellite systems used in surveys, and the important role it plays in creating 3D models of a site. With the field school’s MA student, Josh Feland, I learned about RealityScan and how to do photogrammetry, from small artifacts to large complexes. I was able to later apply these skills in the field, helping Sophie Tews, one of the field school’s supervisors, with the RTK positioning of a monumental tomb structure and an unknown “latrine” structure, which was used to help with photogrammetry of those features. It is incredible to see just how technology has improved our ability to do archaeological work, both in surveying and excavations. These are skills I will continue to refine and use. As I reflect on my three weeks in Jordan, I see that my biggest accomplishments, without a doubt, are developing my photographic techniques, learning how to use software for 3D scanning and modelling, and honing my ability to assess a site and take in-depth notes. Although I had some prior experience with photography and 3D scanning, I was able to learn more about the techniques involved.

Before the field school, I would not have known the importance of shooting photos in aperture mode for photogrammetry or the proper way to take site photographs to use as references for future surveying and excavation. As well, I found that, by the end of the last week, I was able to create in-depth notes which accurately identified and captured key features and aspects of the sites and complexes I worked on. As I continue my education and work as a field archaeologist in CRM, I see these skills becoming invaluable for helping determine whether an area is an archaeological site and quickly assessing specific elements of said site, whether it was a religious complex, a burial feature, or simply a midden/garbage dumping ground. Most especially, my ability to do all of this on my own with little to no supervision — to have my director feel confident in my ability to be unsupervised and produce good work — has been the most profound accomplishment for me. This field school has set me up for success for a future in archaeology by providing me invaluable experience working hands-on with materials, applying theory from class and volunteer work in a practical way, and, most especially, helping confirm that archaeology, with a specialization in heritage management, is the career I see myself pursuing wholeheartedly

Rachel Carroll, Jennifer C. Groot Memorial Fellow (2025-2026), is a fourth-year Combined Honors Undergraduate student at the University of Alberta who is also completing academic certificates in Archaeology and International Learning. Her focus throughout her degree has been on researching how people form and reinforce identities through cultural practices during turbulent and transitional periods.

The post Under the Jordanian Sun: Summary Reflections of a Student Archaeologist at the Humayma Archaeological Field School appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

I had the privilege of staying at the American Center of Research during the months of May, June, and July of 2025 and conducting research on depictions of Midian/Madyan in the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an. Historically, Midian/Madyan is believed to have been located in the northwestern Arabian Peninsula, with its northernmost boundaries around Jordan’s Gulf of Aqaba and its capital in Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk region. In the Hebrew Bible, Midian represents the place where the Prophet Moses is said to have escaped and settled, as well as where the Israelites lived between their exodus from Egypt and arrival in Canaan. The Hebrew Bible is so rich with allusions to God and Midian that since the nineteenth century, a school of biblicists have argued that the Israelites first adopted their conception of their deity from a people who lived there, in what has become known as the Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis. As the idea is based on a scholarly “hunch” rather than a substantial body of evidence, it remains a hypothesis. The biblical allusions are rich, but the archaeological record on Midian has only recently emerged and has yet to reveal anything about the land’s religious landscape (Fig. 1). Naturally, any relevant literature from the Semitic milieu of late antiquity comes as a welcome source of insights. 

Here we come to the Qur’an. Although certainly beyond the secular paradigm of the Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis, the Qur’an lends weight to the idea that in Madyan there was a precedent for Israelite religious thought. While the Qur’an shares with the Hebrew Bible the account of the Prophet Moses meeting his father-in-law in Madyan, it also features a unique account of a Prophet Shu’aib, who is portrayed as having preached there centuries before the Prophet Moses or the Israelites arrived. Whereas the Hebrew Bible calls the Prophet Moses’s father-in-law “the Priest of Midian” without saying anything about this priest’s religion, the Qur’an conveys a continuity of beliefs between him and his regional predecessor, the Prophet Shu’aib. Although the Qur’anic style generally lends to thematic continuity between prophets, it would appear that the Qur’an is specifically highlighting Madyan’s regional religious significance; not only does Madyan account for one of the few place names in the scripture, but it is also the only land in which the stories of both an “Arabian” and a “biblical” prophet—Shu’aib and Moses, respectively—take place. This significance might not have been lost on the Qur’an’s 7th-century audience in the neighboring Hejaz, for whom Madyan was a cultural-spatial bridge between them and Palestine. One example of how the Qur’an impresses religious significance upon Madyan is how it insists on its location for Mount Sinai. The Qur’an insisted on a Midian location despite the belief current since the 4th century that this mountain was located in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, an association cemented by Justinian I’s construction of the St. Katherine’s Monastery there. Mount Sinai’s location is just one case in which the Qur’an subtly weighs in on important debates among biblicists. 

I am honored to have resided and conducted research at ACOR (Fig. 2). It is a place of gathering for archaeologists and enthusiasts of the region’s history. The library has for decades facilitated research that draws from diverse primary and secondary sources, putting archaeological findings in conversation with religious scriptures and their commentaries. Most importantly, ACOR is the home of a cohort of researchers and scholars from a range of disciplines, all converging on their interest in the region. I am honored to be the first ACOR fellow since 2002 to be awarded a grant focused on Qur’anic research and hope to see more projects like it in the future. I would like to extend my warmest gratitude to my fellowship grantors, Dr. Pierre and the late Dr. Patricia Bikai, for their generous patronage of my research, as well as ACOR’s staff for facilitating such a comfortable, welcoming stay. 

Kareem Rosshandler was the 2025–2026 recipient of the Pierre and Patricia Bikai Fellowship. He is a PhD student at Emory University in the fields of Islamic studies and comparative religions. Prior to resuming his academic career, he served as a researcher and project manager at the West Asia-North Africa Institute in Amman, Jordan. His focus areas included human security, international trade, and refugee inclusion. He received his BA from the George Washington University and his MA in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago.

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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).

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For historians of the Middle East, medieval documents and manuscripts are integral resources to better understand the social and intellectual milieu of their objects of study. Islamic manuscript archives and repositories are often quite challenging to access; an even greater challenge is the ability to read and analyze the documents themselves. For the past eight years, and during my 2024 ACOR-NEH Fellowship, I have spent a significant amount of time pursuing documentary and textual research at the Center for Documents and Manuscripts (CDM) at the University of Jordan while finishing my book project, Blasphemy (Sabb al-Rasūl) as a Legal Category in Early and Medieval Islamic History. Located within several blocks of ACOR, the CDM contains more than 30,000 manuscripts from the Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman eras. In addition to preserving physical manuscripts, for the past thirty years the CDM has also pursued another important project: digitizing manuscript collections from across the Levant and North Africa. With the onset of the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war, and now with ongoing violence in Lebanon, many of these regional collections are either no longer accessible or entirely destroyed, making the CDM’s digitized collection all the more an indispensable resource for researchers. 

Colleagues in other fields often ask me how I read and analyze manuscripts and documentary records in order to deduce historically relevant information. How does one determine a manuscript’s date of creation, scribal history, and authorship? What codicological clues does one use, in terms of the document’s material construction, handwriting, and illumination in order to date a manuscript and determine whether it is authentic? I address these questions in a three-part series. In my first Insights essay, I addressed the material construction of Ottoman codices and how historians examine certain aspects of medieval book construction in order to date a manuscript. In my second, I examined how researchers use calligraphic script identification and manuscript illumination to deduce the age and geographic origins of a manuscript, with special focus on the Mamluk era. In both of the aforementioned essays, I focused on books as historical objects, which often contain a plethora of clues that allow us to pursue accurate dating. But what happens when one only has a fragment of a page or a documentary record that is not part of a book? Such a scenario is far more common, especially in eras predating the Mamluk Empire, such as the Ayyubid and Fatimid eras. In this third installment, I shall address how historians use handwriting, text format, and material construction of fragments to estimate the age of a manuscript, with special attention to the Ayyubid and Fatimid eras.

Dating Documents Based on Material Construction

An important clue when attempting to identify the era and region in which a document was produced is examining the material construction. In Figure 1, the first attribute that jumps out to a trained historian is the fact that the artifact consists of porous and fibrous cross-laid strips. This texture indicates that the artifact is not made from paper, but rather from papyrus. Papyrus strips are paper-like, self-adhering sheets made from the stalk of the papyrus plant, which is indigenous to Africa, including Egypt. Papyrus was used as a material upon which to write in a variety of local languages in Egypt from about 3000 BCE to the 10^th century CE. After Alexander the Great seized Egypt from the Achaemenid Empire in the 4^th century BCE, Greek emerged as the primary written language of government administration, literature, and private document production. It remained so during the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine eras and was only replaced with Arabic in the 7^th century, after the Arab conquest. We also know that after the 10^th century CE, paper become the predominant material for writing in North Africa (for more on this topic, see Khan 2006; Goldberg and Krakowski 2019). Hence, based on the fact that the document is written on papyrus and that it is written in Arabic, we can deduce that it was most likely produced between the 7^th and 10^th centuries in Egypt. It is also possible that the papyrus was produced in Egypt for export and the document was written elsewhere.

Dating Documents Based on Vocabulary and Format

The vocabulary used in a document can also provide clues to confirm usage and dating, especially if patterns exist across a specific genre. The document in Figure 2 is a Fatimid Islamic iqrār, or security agreement. In the Fatimid and Ayyubid eras, Islamic security agreements were written using a very specific battery of formulary in the same sequence and with specific word placement on the page, similar to a modern-day administrative form (for more on this document type see Müller 2008; Lufti 1983). 

In the aforementioned iqrār, we see that the first line constitutes the basmala, or invocation to seek blessings from God. The block of text then begins with the word ‘aqarra’ , followed by specific formulary identifying the litigants, the amount owed, and payment plan, followed by a promise to pay off said debt on the part of the debtor (binding debt clause). On the last line of block text, the date of the agreement is recorded in the bottom left corner, followed by two short lines in the bottom right corner identifying the witnesses (witness confirmation clause), albeit now faded or erased. We know from other social history sources that iqrār documents in this specific format were not produced until the Ayyubid era (Ackerman-Lieberman 2007; Thung 1996). Hence, moving back to Figure 1 above, we are now able to observe some additional clues in dating our text: 1) that the document begins with the basmala and the word ‘aqarra’, the identifying formulary for iqrār documents; and 2) that the document appears to have the date written by the scribe on the last line in the far left corner, albeit faded to the point of partial legibility, as Rajab AH 312, which converts to 924 CE. Bringing together all of the aforementioned evidence on document construction and document vocabulary, we can say that the facts suggest without internal contradiction that the document is an Ayyubid or early Fatimid iqrār record produced toward the beginning of the 10^th century CE. 

In the document in Figure 2, the text and lines are straight and somewhat compressed, with very little space in between each line. One also can observe several areas where erasure and possible re-drafting has been attempted, such as the witness confirmation section on the bottom right corner. On the back of the document is also another unrelated draft that appears to be writing practice of some sort. This is quite different from, for example, the document in Figure 3.

In this Fatimid-era document, the text is curvilinear. We also observe ample spacing with no visible erasures and no drafted documents on the back. We know from the patterns that we have observed in studying manuscript genres from the Ayyubid and Fatimid eras that texts intended for public presentation or for an audience with the caliph and his court were often written in curvilinear script with ample spacing and in specific calligraphic styles. Such is the case in this letter in Figure 3, which was meant to be read to the Fatimid caliph (for more on this topic, see Rustow 2020). Writing materials were expensive and hence needed to be used economically, so documents written for internal administrative purposes, such as court records, were often written in small and economically spaced script, with both sides of the paper used (with no necessary link between the record written on the recto and the record written on the verso) (for a detailed analysis of handwriting and text placement in this context, see Rustow 2019). Therefore, in this case, we can deduce that the document in Figure 2 was likely either a court record or a scribe’s draft not intended for public display or performative reading. 

Manuscript fragments and individual documentary records, not just books, can be decoded and analyzed for clues that tell us more about their content and the social environment in which they were constructed. Altogether, the material construction of a manuscript fragment, coupled with an awareness of the typical vocabulary, format, writing style, and spacing of specific genres, provide clues to the historian regarding the date and geographic origin of a medieval document or manuscript. Such fragments, when studied together with other primary sources, are enormously valuable resources for learning more about medieval societies. 

References

Ackerman-Lieberman, Phillip Isaac. 2007. “A Partnership Culture: Jewish Economic and Social Life Seen through the Legal Documents of the Cairo Geniza.” PhD dissertation. Princeton University.

Khan, Geoffrey. 2006. Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Goldberg, Jessica and Eve Krakowski. 2019. “Introduction: A Handbook for Documentary Geniza Research in the Twenty-First Century.” Jewish History 32: 115–130.

Lutfi, Huda. 1983. “A Study of Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs From al-Quds Relating to Muslim Women.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 26(3): 246–294.  

Müller, Christian. 2008. “Acknowledgement.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, < http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_0166 >. Leiden: Brill.  

Rustow, Marina. 2019. “Fatimid State Documents.” Jewish History 32(2/4): 221–277.

Rustow, Marina. 2020. The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thung, Michael. 1996. “Written Obligations from the 2^nd/8^th to the 4^th/10^th Century.” Islamic Law and Society 3(1): 1–12. 

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 Fatimid and Ayyubid Manuscript Fragments through Handwriting and Material Analysis appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

This year I was able to participate in the study season for the Khirbet al-Muhkayyat Project, along with Kathleen Macleod Kerr, a fellow undergraduate student from Wilfrid Laurier University. We were delighted to return to the dig house in Madaba where we had stayed in 2023 while completing the field-school credit for our degree program. However, this year we felt like true members of the team, as we were participating in work that would make its way into final project reports. 

When we first arrived in Jordan, on May 14, we still had a few days to ourselves before the senior team members arrived. We decided to take a return trip to Petra, since it had been so breathtaking last year, and it was just as mind-blowing this year (and even better, I was able to visit on my birthday!). We spent some time trekking up the steep hills of Wadi Musa back to our hotel and were able to stop and catch our breath while talking and playing soccer with some local boys. Talking with them was a nice break while we regained our composure from the long walk up hills and stairs.

A few days later, work kicked off in the dining-room-turned-office in the dig house. The kitchen tables were transformed into an intricate maze of makeshift desks where everyone pored over articles, potsherds, maps, and bones. The main task for Kathleen and I was to draw potsherds from last year’s field season that had been stored in the museum in Madaba; our drawings would become illustrations in the reports that senior members were writing (Fig. 1). We also worked on editing and digitizing pottery drawings from last year, as well as previous years, practiced some pottery reading, and helped with organizational housekeeping tasks such as labeling boxes and bags of human and animal remains. It was a wonderful opportunity and experience to work more closely with the senior team members than we had our first year, and we both hope to return to Jordan next field season to work with everyone again.

During our final few days in Jordan, Kathleen and I decided to venture out on our own to experience Jordan in ways that we did not have time to do in 2023 given our tight schedule. We took a taxi down to Wadi Mujib and experienced an exhilarating (both because of the scenery and from fighting the currents) hike through the waterfalls and beautiful stone passageways. It was well worth the hike to reach the waterfall at the end of the trail (Fig. 2)! The next day, we took a trip to Amman with the logistics manager for the project, Mashoor, and his family to visit the project leader, Prof. Debra Foran. In Amman, at Jafra Restaurant and Café, we had the most delicious breakfast I have ever experienced. We then headed to the American Center of Research to have lunch and chat with researchers staying there and were able to explore the grounds a bit before heading into the library to get some more work done (Fig. 3). 

Overall, our trip to Jordan was well worth it, and with our newfound knowledge and valuable experiences, we hope to return as part of the KMAP team next summer

Nina Rozic is an undergraduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, finishing up her fourth year and graduating with a major in archaeology and heritage studies and a minor in global studies. Recipient of the Jennifer C. Groot Memorial Fellowship, she is interested in pottery and artifact care and curation and enjoys learning about Near Eastern and Mesoamerican archaeology. In 2024 Nina is also participating in a work-study program in collections management, working with cataloging and re-boxing legacy collections at her university, as well as working on completing an individualized directed study on Mamluk pottery from Trans-central Jordan under Dr. Debra Foran, using survey pottery from previous seasons.

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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.

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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.

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In November 1980, the Arab League met in Amman, Jordan, for a summit aimed at promoting Arab unity, particularly against Israel and Egypt, which had concluded a peace treaty the previous year. But the summit rapidly fell apart, as members of the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front (جبهة الصمود والتّصدي) — Syria, Algeria, Libya, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) — boycotted the meeting, and Syria and Jordan mobilized thousands of troops to their shared border. Although hostilities were avoided, the incident signaled deepening fissures in the Arab world, which was now split into two major camps: the so-called moderates — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq — which supported Iraq’s war against Iran, and the purportedly “radical” Steadfastness Front backing Iran and boycotting the summit.

Just two years earlier, the Arabs had come together in Baghdad, Iraq, for a summit where they presented a united front against the Egyptian-Israeli rapprochement. Now the Steadfastness Front, originally formed in 1977 as a bulwark against Egypt’s defection from the Arab fold, seemingly worked against Arab unity, aligning itself with both Iran and the Soviet Union; in fact, in early 1980, the Front’s members were the only Arab states to vote against the United Nations resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Sudan also voted agains the resolution, but later claimed it was unintentional [Dishon and Maddy-Weitzman 1981: 180].) 

What led to this division within the Arab world? How did the Front relate to the Soviet Union and the United States? How did these “radical” Arabs impact regional and Cold War dynamics? My dissertation project seeks to answer these questions. To my knowledge, the Front’s importance has not received sustained scholarly attention, and it certainly has not been explored using archival sources. I argue that relations between the United States, Soviet Union, and Arab “radicals” — including the Steadfastness Front and, until about 1979, Iraq — played a significant role in the decline of superpower détente and reshaped the Greater Middle East. It highlights the agency of small, relatively weak state and nonstate actors in the Global Cold War, illustrating their ability to shape events in their favor (Smith 2000). It does so by examining the Front’s internal dynamics, its members’ behavior in Arab and world politics both publicly (e.g., at the United Nations, Arab League summits, and Non-Aligned Movement conferences) and privately, and its influence on and response to major historical processes including the Lebanese Civil War, Iranian Revolution, Ogaden War, Egyptian-Israeli peace process, and Soviet-Afghan War. Ultimately, I argue that while the Front failed to block the Egyptian-Israeli peace process, it succeeded in preventing the peace process from expanding further.

I will tell this complex story drawing on sources in English, Arabic, Bulgarian, and Russian. My research will take me to various archives in the United States, United Kingdom, and Bulgaria, including several repositories with Arabic-language collections, such as the Ba’th Party Records at the Hoover Institution. In addition to archival research, I will also draw on memoirs, journalistic accounts, speeches, and interviews to fill in the gaps left by spotty documentary records and limited archival access in the Arab world. In my time at the American Center of Research as the Pierre and Patricia Bikai Fellow, I worked to translate portions of memoirs by important Arab leaders, including Mudar Badran, George Habash, and Abdessalam Jelloud. 

References

Dishon, Daniel and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman. 1981. “Inter-Arab Relations.” In Middle East Contemporary Survey, vol. IV: 1979–80, edited by Colin Legum, Haim Shaked, and Daniel Dishon, 180. New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishers.

Smith, Tony. 2000. “New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War.” Diplomatic History 24 (4): 567–591.

Benjamin V. Allison is a PhD student in history and a Graduate Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the history of U.S. foreign and national security policy, especially toward the Middle East and Russia. His work has been published in Perspectives on Terrorism and by the International Centre for Counter-terrorism. As for his public-facing work, he has bylines at Time, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Not Even Past, Inkstick, RealClearHistory, the Wilson Center, and the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College.

The post Through the Cracks of Détente: The Superpowers, the Arab “Radicals,” and the Coming of the Second Cold War, 1977–1984 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.

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