If you've been reading other blogs, you've probably already read about some of our adventures in the final four days of our Canadian group's adventure. But maybe I can hit a few notes that others haven't already sounded.
The three-day trip to Jordan was in some ways a fitting capstone to the whole two weeks. For one thing, the culture shock would have been immense had we gone there any earlier. Transitioning from North American to Israel was a big enough shift, and then going from Israel to Jordan was equally massive again. Partly this is due to the changing climate and topography as one moves east from the Mediterranean: it gets hotter and drier, and fewer things grow. Colours leach out and everything seems to turn one or another shade of grey or brown. In addition though, the human culture shifts too. Israel, as "foreign" as it obviously is in many ways, is still recognizably Western-influenced, if more via Europe than via North America. Jordan is definitely part of the Arab world, which has its own-- and very different-- set of norms governing everything from social customs to housing norms to bathroom standards to... well, you get the point. It was a good thing we went there last rather than first.
Archaeologically speaking too it was a good thing we went there last, for Jordan's ruins are if anything quite a bit more spectacular than most of what we had seen in Israel. There was, in fact, a very logical progression throughout our two-week stay. First we got acquainted with "our" Decapolis city, Hippos, whose ruins are fairly modest. There's a lot to see and learn about, but to be honest its remains are pretty fragmentary and impoverished. However, we didn't really perceive this at first since it was the only Decapolis city we knew! Only when we went to Beth Shean, a week into our trip, did we see a better-preserved city that was part of the same urban league that HIppos belonged to. As I wrote earlier, it was a real eye-opener to see Beth Shean's main streets-- both of them-- with many intact columns and shops, and even whole buildings such as temples and theatres fairly well preserved. Then, when we went to Sepphoris later the same day, we saw some first-class mosaics that again helped provide a wider context for the remains that we had been working with all week in HIppos. Hmmm. Both of those cities, Beth Shean and Sepphoris, opened our eyes in significant ways to the richness of life in the Decapolis.
Jordan did the same for us again, first at Jerash and then even more spectacularly at Petra.
Jerash's value, for me anyway, was the expanded scale of its ruins. It included not just one but two large plazas, each of them surrounded by a huge colonnade. The oval plaza, below, was my favourite.
Behind this, to the right of this structure but just outside the picture itself, is a fairly-intact Temple of Zeus. We didn't spend much time there at all, but it certainly gave us an impressed appreciation for its commanding position and grandeur. Even better though was Jerash's Temple of Artemis, which-- as others have related--includes a number of columns that almost miraculously resisted tumbling in the massive 749 earthquake because of the clever concave/convex ends on each of their drums. This design resisted lateral movement, but instead created a "rocking" motion of one drum against the next in seismic events. Here's a photo of one of our guys pushing on one of these columns-- yes, enough to actually make its movement visible, when we looked at a spoon shoved between the column and its base.
The proof that none of these columns ever fell, not even in the massive 749 quake, is in the fine quality decoration on these columns' capitals, which would certainly have smashed to bits had they ever tumbled to the ground.
The other most-impressive thing about this temple, which I actually didn't notice at the time but read about later, is that its complex extended on both sides of the main street! At the time, we were naturally focussed on the temple itself, which stands at the head of a massive ceremonial set of stairs ascending from the city's main street. But leading toward those stairs, across the main drag, is another whole section of ceremonial street-- a via sacra-- which created a processional way that was several full blocks long, and may have even extended further (though no one quite knows for sure). Wow!
As impressive as Jerash was, though, Petra was even better. No it wasn't a Decapolis city, and yes the state of its Roman-era ruins is more fragmentary than Jerash's, but the other dimensions of its remains are so unbelievably spectacular that it truly was, archaeologically speaking, the hands-down highlight of the whole trip.
No doubt you've seen pictures-- in books, or even in the Indiana Jones movies-- of some of Petra's more famous facades. They're rightly well-known, and truly more impressive in person than in photos. In fact, I'm grossly disappointed reviewing my pictures of the city, because they all look washed-out and feeble compared to the vivid memories that are still, a week later, burned in my brain. Not just the remarkably good state of preservation of these ancient ruins, many of them dating from before the time of Christ, makes them impressive, but also the wholly unexpected range of colour of the stone from which they are made. We saw reds (tons of reds!), yellows, and even blues, sometimes running in adjacent bands or swirls that were like a hallucination, so bright and whimsical they seemed. The photos below, as I said before, don't even come close to capturing the reality-- but maybe give you a bit of an idea.
Even better than these often-pictured buildings though was the "high place" that five of us hiked up to. Our guide, Sami, told Doc Schuler a "back route" to take to get up there, which proved to be a wonderful suggestion, since along the way we got to see things that even the Doc hadn't seen before on any of his previous visits.
One of the highlights was the Tomb of the Roman Soldier, which is interesting enough in itself but even more fascinating because-- again-- it was part of a larger complex that extended across the "street" (in this case, a narrow path). To our modern mindset, buildings separated by a public road are always, always, always separate from each other, so it doesn't even occur to us to think of them creating a single space. But here too, as in so many other respects, ancient thinking was very different than ours. So across the street from the Tomb of the Roman Soldier is its spectacular triclinium-- a large rock-cut room with three massive raised-up areas on which dining-couches once stood. Upon these, diners (and partiers) would share banquets, drink, and good times while remembering and celebrating the dead who lay in the tomb across the street. What a neat discovery!
Several couches would have stood beside each other (end to end) on each of the three sides of this triclinium. Here, Steph demonstrates the posture diners would have adopted upon them.
Anyway, that complex lay enroute to the "high place"-- literally, the very peak of a mountain upon which sacrifices were made for centuries to the gods. We saw a somewhat-comparable facility in Tell Dan as well, but that one wasn't nearly as "high" as this one here in Petra, which features no walls or structure to speak of apart from the carved-out platform, a small (20 cm high) altar in its midst, and a larger (50 cm high) altar off to the side. Somewhat chilling were the drain-channels both in the main platform and in the basin next to the larger altar, both of which probably served to carry away not just rainwater but also the blood of the sacrificial victims. Holy crow!
Dr. Jim Gimbel beside the altar. The drainage channel is beneath his left hand.
It's one thing to see a large stone-built temple, as we'd seen them many places in many cities before this point. The pleasing architecture and fine craftsmanship of those places serves to disguise the stark business they were really about-- appeasing the gods by means of sacrifice, works-righteousness in naked form. But this high place wore no such disguise. Altar, slaughtering-table, platform, and that's it. And right on top of the mountain like this, the better to reach directly to the gods without any intervening space. It was quite an experience to see this.
Otherwise, Petra had a lot of other neat "highs" too, of course. As others have commented, the view from the mountain peak just west of the city is absolutely stunning, with an overlook of the Wadi Arabah that extends from the foot of this mountain range all the way west into Israel, and from north to south extending from the Dead Sea all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba (the northern tip of the Persian Gulf). I've stood atop high mountains before, but never one quite like this.
Within the city itself, several building details struck me as memorable and significant as well. One was the very clever method that the Nabateans who built this city (and civilization) came up with to earthquake-proof (or at least fortify) their buildings. The Romans at Jerash had their convex/concave columns, but these Nabateans used pieces of wood sandwiched between courses of stone to provide a comparable level of "flex." Smart!
The layer of wood is near the mid-point of the picture, extending "around the corner" into both walls.
Another intriguing detail of a very different sort-- spiritual rather than mechanical-- was the baptistry in the Byzantine-era church off Petra's main street. As you can see, it was cruciform, all the better to visually represent our baptism "into Christ." As if that wasn't neat enough, it also had a small round basin beside it (toward the top right in this picture) which may-- may!-- have been a feature used to baptize infants. Again, very cool!
I could go on and on, but I think the overall picture is pretty clear. Petra is probably the most intriguing place I have ever been in my life. I dearly hope I can get back there again someday!
Finally, after several hours in Amman and a series of border mis-adventures that other bloggers have already well-described, we got back to Ein Gev much later than expected on Sunday night before leaving at 6:00 AM on Monday for a very quick trip to Jerusalem. Again, you've read others' comments on the various sites we ran through-- almost quite literally in a couple of cases! For me though it was an interesting trip in a different sense, since this was my second trip to the city. Even thought I had been there only once, and two years earlier, it was enough that I had a good sense of the lay of the land and wasn't nearly so off-balance with its newness as I had been the first time. That, in turn, freed me up to experience the spiritual force of its commemorative sites more fully than I had before.
Within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for instance, I worried less about finding my way around and taking appropriate photos (though I still took some), and was consequently better able to let the reality of the place wash over me. This is where He died, this is where he was anointed, this is where he was laid, this is where he rose from. O Lord, have mercy! Even granting the lack of absolute certainty (were these really the right places after all?), it was a very powerful and moving experience. I'm so glad I had a chance to re-visit all of these places again.
Waiting to enter the "aedicula," the miniature building-within-a-building atop the stone which is commemorated as the tomb in which Christ was laid. (See the photo below and its caption, for more context.)
If you know which doorway to go through, you can find your way--WITHIN the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!-- to this passageway leading to three rock-cut tombs from the first century AD, just a few metres west of the little building covering the place where Christ's tomb is commemorated.
The place where Joseph of Arimathea is commemorated for anointing Jesus' body, just inside the entry to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This large stone tablet was placed there in the early 19th century to replace one that had literally been worn out by the touch of generations of earlier pilgrims.
And that's about it for now, I think. Maybe I'll post again in a couple of days, more about my post-trip impressions. Thanks for reading along up to this point!

Recent Comments