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Twenty-Two Layers in the History of Greater Syria

I've described the itinerary of my trip by rental car through Syria. I traveled by bus from Aleppo to Damascus, stopping off in Hama. From Damascus I took a day trip by bus to the old Roman city of Bosra.

I flew from Damascus via Bahrain, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi to Sanaa, Yemen. Ten days later I returned to Damascus via Cairo, where I spent four hours wandering through the old city.

I went to Beirut and Baalbek in the Beqqa Valley, Lebanon, by shared taxi and returned the next day to Damascus.

On the following day I took a shared taxi to Amman, Jordan, where I rented a car and drove to Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba, the Dead Sea resort of Suwayma, and the upland towns of Karak and Madaba.

I flew from the Amman airport to Ankara and thence to Frankfurt and home.

1975-1992

`Ali, my Arabic tutor before I left for the Middle East, was a Christian from Beirut. He grew up in the eighties during the civil war. When I asked him what it was like, he said you got used to the bombs, and didn't worry unless they were nearby. The tensest moment, he said, was one time when the whole family was huddling in the bathroom and the rest of the house was on fire.

He couldn't tell me the Arabic word for postage stamp. When he was growing up, there was no postal system in Lebanon.

Beirut had been touted as the most beautiful city in the Middle East before the war, and it is easy to see why. Its suburbs are built into a bowl of hills surrounding the central city, white buildings embedded in greenery with the blue Mediterranean below. I entered the city in a shared taxi from Damascus, and the road into Beirut twisted down these hills in hairpin curves.

We entered the main part of the city along Rue de Damascus, which had been the border between East Beirut and West Beirut, the Muslim and the Christian sections. We drove through slow traffic past bombed out buildings and walls pocked with bullet holes.

The taxi driver who took me to the Hamra district, where I would stay, was an old Armenian, whose nephew lived in Fresno. He said I should have seen Hamra before the war. It was all Christian then. But they all left for Europe, and now it's 90% Muslim.

The National Museum, though small, had nicely presented displays. There had been lots of Egyptian influence in the second millennium B.C. I have never been able to get a strong sense of Phoenician culture, and I was not able to here either, although there was a nice mask from the 700s B.C. The Greek and Roman material was pretty standard stuff--a couple of unusually expressive sculptures, some fine mosaics, and very nice glass, although you didn't know what was intention and what was age. Some Islamic displays. But the final display was the remains of artifacts that had been destroyed when a bomb hit a storeroom during the civil war.

In and amongst the ruins there was a lot of new construction as well. The Beirut Central District, around the Place d'Étoile, was being rebuilt on the exact plan that existed before the war, and its cafes were just beginning to attract customers. A Roman street and the Roman baths, ruins of a former age, were nicely integrated with the modern architecture. I wondered if they would preserve some of the ruins of the civil war, as a reminder of what not to do.

The remarkable thing about Beirut today is how peaceful it is. I walked around the campus of the American University of Beirut, American-style university buildings among the trees, students lounging in the quads or reading on park benches overlooking the Mediterranean. Just before sunset I walked along the Corniche, the walkway by the sea, with the strollers and joggers, past men standing on rocks at the edge of the sea casting fishing lines into the water. Christians and Muslims walked together in peace. Overhead the sky turned turbulent orange.

Surely if people can live in peace in Beirut, so soon after the end of a bitter bitter civil war, there is hope for Israel and Palestine.

1990

In Aleppo Samir took me to what is now a small mosque near his carpet shop, and showed me a Hebrew inscription on its wall. He said you could tell the former synagogues by their pointed domes. This section of the old town was formerly the Jewish section of Aleppo. Many of course wanted to emigrate, but Assad would not let them; it would be providing manpower to his enemy Israel. Then in 1990 Assad suddenly announced that they could leave if they did so within 48 hours. They had to sell everything, and so much came on the market during those two days that they sold at huge losses. Now the Jewish section of Aleppo is gone, and the synagogues are now mosques.

1980s

The Beqqa Valley in Lebanon is flat green crop and red clay farmland between the red Lebanon Range and the brown Anti-Lebanon Range. The buildings are all beige rock, beige cement, and beige plaster, and relatively new. But I would look at every house and wonder if kidnapping victims were held there in the 1980s. I would look at every man and try to judge from his age whether he had been a kidnapper in the 1980s or a child who had aspired to be a kidnapper.

But in fact there was nothing in the environment itself that triggered my sense of ominous danger.

1980s

Some sites represent more than one era, sometimes incongruously so. The Takkiya as-Suleymannia mosque in Damascus, next door to the National Museum, was an early work by the Albanian architect Sinon, who later capped his career with the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. It is pleasant enough, and maybe shows early signs of genius. But in the 1980s Assad combined it with a military museum. Now as you walk through the courtyard of the mosque, you walk past a Russian MIG, a reminder of the close ties Syria had then with the Soviet Union.

1982

Rather than take a bus directly to Damascus from Aleppo, I took a bus to Hama along the way and walked around there for a couple of hours first. There are a few old buildings. There is an old bridge, and the small and squat but charming An-Nouri Mosque. I saw four of the norias or water wheels, wonderfully intricate dark wooden contraptions as much as 60 feet in diameter, standing still in stagnant water. One or two old buildings and a few fresh ruins remained.

Hama once had one of the most unspoiled and unique old towns in the Middle East, with winding souqs and houses overhanging the river. In the early 1980s the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood began to be active in this area. In 1982 Assad Senior had his army surround the town and attack. 20,000 innocent people were slaughtered, and the historic old town was leveled.

There has been virtually no dissent in Syria since then.

1916-1918

Wadi Rum in southern Jordan seems completely ahistorical, as ahistorical as the Grand Canyon. Its attraction is the power of nature. But a little bit of history did happen here. This is where T. E. Lawrence, ``Lawrence of Arabia", organized Bedouin tribes to revolt against the Ottoman Turks in World War I, and there are two historical sites from this era. There is a tree beside what is called ``Lawrence's Spring", and there are a few rocks stacked and cemented together against a boulder--his home. Not much. But nature here is as grand as any desert scenery in the world. High buttes of colors from black to brown to red to orange rise above deep flat sands of colors from orange to blond.

As soon as I drove into town a young Jordanian in an old, beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser pulled even with me and offered me a trip into the desert. I bargained him down from 30 Jordanian dinars to 23, bought a detailed map to see where we would be going, and stashed a bottle of water, a Mars bar, and an orange into my daypack in case we broke down or he abandoned me in the desert. I got in and he stopped for gas. He asked me for 10 Jordanian dinars to pay for it. I refused; I had seen too many people go through personality changes as soon as they are paid. He said evenly, ``As you wish," but I suspected he was offended. He spoke little during our excursion, and in fact I never learned his name.

His Land Cruiser had no ignition key. He had two wires twisted together to stop it and a third wire to start it--hot wiring his own car! My door had no exterior door handle, and to open it from the inside I had to bang on it. Some paneling was missing near my feet, giving me no protection against sand the tires kicked up. But the thing kept on running. He said the old ones last forever and are easy to fix on the spot. The new ones break down immediately in this desert.

There was a list of specified items of tourist interest, and I had made a selection from among them. We started off on a sand track, rounded Ragobet Um Ejil, drove into Wadi Um Ishrin, and turned east toward a large red sand dune. I climbed it--I'm not sure why; because it was there, no doubt. The view from the top was of the gray buttes nearby, the red-orange dune, the intense blue sky, and one lone treelet at the base of the dune.

Then we looked at some Bedouin inscriptions in the smooth face of a cliff on Jebel An Faishiyya--crude pictures of camels. They could have been a thousand years old, or they could have been scratched in yesterday. We drove around Jebel Barrah and to the entrance of Siq al-Barrah. Everywhere the geology was spectacular. He drove up a 45o rock slope to show me what his vehicle could do.

We circled east of Jebel Moharrog to a long Bedouin tent, partitioned into a family part and a tourist part, and an old woman served me tea. She and my driver carried on a lively conversation; she had a warm and interesting face, smooth and complicated gestures, and a warm smile, but they were for him, not for me, whom they both ignored. I looked around the tent. It was made of Bedouin blankets held up at the four corners by a thick straight pole, a crooked stick, a bamboo pole, and a . A straw mat to sit on and some small pillows. A plastic milk carton with a teapot and a cookie tin. It was an interesting mix of native materials and Western goods.

Then my driver and I set off in search of his sister-in-law, whom he believed was out here somewhere. We drove to the west side of Um Hashadeh, getting stuck in deep sand briefly until he rocked out. He spotted two women on donkeys in the distance and drove to them. They pointed back and around to the other side of Um Hashadeh, and we drove over there, and spotted a lone young woman with a small boy sitting in the skimpy shade of a cliff watching a donkey, a dog, and a small herd of goats.

I had not been entirely comfortable with him for the entire trip, and this feeling was exacerbated as I sat in the sand, in the balmy breeze, and drank the tea that she brewed. My driver said to me, ``You want woman? We find nice Bedouin girl for you." In fact his sister-in-law was quite attractive, but I didn't think he was selling his relatives, and I was so thrown off by this remark that I ignored it. The goats climbed in thorn bushes. The boy drew in the sand with his finger, and then made an airplane out of two skinny twigs and brought it in for a landing. He eyed me suspiciously, including when I made a stick airplane too. Both he and his mother ignored all my attempts to make conversation in my minimal Arabic.

Then the driver said something else very strange. ``We spend night here." In fact it was very comfortable lying back in the sand on a balmy morning, but an overnight stay had been no part of the three-hour excursion I thought I was paying for. My thoughts turned to a Japanese movie I once saw, ``Woman of the Dunes". A Tokyo entomologist gets stuck in an isolated desert area one weekend, and some local men offer him a place to spend the night. It is at the bottom of a large pit in the sand, that he descends into on a rope ladder, in a house owned by a widow. The next morning the rope ladder is gone, and he learns that he is a captive there to be the woman's husband and help her in mining salt in the pit. He is trapped there for years.

I imagined how I would leap onto the back of the truck if he tried to drive off without me. I wondered if I could find my way back, and how long the walk would take, and whether my slim food and water supplies would last. I wondered how difficult it would be to catch and skin a goat to survive.

But of course nothing of the sort happened. She offered me a second cup of tea. I drank it. No one objected to my taking pictures of all of them. As we left, my ``shukran" (thank you) was not acknowledged.

We drove next to a viewpoint for the large Rock Bridge of Burdah. On the way we passed a party of about a dozen tourists picnicking in the shade of a rock. I waved at them and my driver waved at their driver. We drove to the little Rock Bridge of Rakehbt Al-Wadek, which I climbed. Then we drove back to the town of Rum. I paid him 25 Jordanian dinars, which he took without comment. I drove the Desert Highway to Aqaba.

1099-1271

In Latakia, Syria, I got up before dawn and drove south on the freeway that borders the Mediterranean Sea. Halfway down the Syrian coast I stopped at a café that looked like it was about to open, and convinced the proprietor to make me a cup of tea that I could drink sitting at a rickety table under a sagging thatched roof on a pavilion at the edge of a cliff over the blue sea. Then I drove further south, turned east near Tartous, and then turned north to Krak des Chevaliers.

After the Crusaders had taken Jerusalem in 1099, they extended their rule to the entire littoral, and in the mid 1100s they built this castle on the site of an older Muslim fortress. It must be the most magnificent fortress in the world. There is one touch of obvious artistry, the Gothic arches of the loggia in an upper courtyard. The rest is all utilitarian, but so thoroughly so that it defines its own sort of artistry.

It is perched on top of a steep hill with a commanding view of the countryside. The thick walls are high and unscalable. It was still early in the morning when I got there, and I was alone. I climbed up to the top of all the towers, and then I descended to explore the lower chambers--a kitchen with a vaulted ceiling, a room full of pillars, storage rooms with huge ceramic vats for wine and oil. Passage led on to passage, like a video game without the monsters. I'd peek into a room on my way to something else, see a doorway, and take that instead to the next room and the next, and then a break in the wall would take me out to a terrace outside the walls and to another tower overlooking the buildings of the outer castle. I saw a secret passageway about three feet wide, dark except by occasional windows. I got out my flashlight and followed it, past doorways to storerooms, around a corner, and into a narrower and darker passageway, and after 50 meters around another corner and into a narrow passage with a foot-deep trench down the middle. At the end of this, I went up a flight of stairs, and I was by the loggia again.

The castle is so well built that a very few Crusaders could defend it against the opposing hordes. In fact, it was one of the last places in the Middle East that the Crusaders abandoned, in 1271, and then not because they were beaten, but because the Crusades were over everywhere else and there was no longer any point in staying.

During Ottoman times in the outer castle, underground baths were built--a honeycomb of small domed rooms and small courtyards opening to the sky through holes in the ground. I found a dark narrow staircase that led to a level below the baths and then a stairway up to the baths, and I wandered around the maze of small rooms until I found a stairway back up to ground level.

Krak des Chevaliers is definitely one of those sites you don't have to bring your imagination to. You can go there bone ignorant and it will create your fantasies for you.

661-750

I love cities that have layers and layers of history in evidence. Few cities in the world have as much history as Damascus. No city has been continuously inhabited for a longer period of time. There is the Street Called Straight, one of the main thoroughfares of the Old City since the time of Alexander the Great. At the northeast corner of the Old City is the underground Chapel of Ananias, reputedly the home of the man who in the Book of Acts cured Saint Paul of his blindness.

Nearer to the center of the Old City are several columns that used to be a part of the Temple of Jupiter in Roman times. When the Arabs conquered Damascus in the 600s A.D., they tore the temple down and built the Umayyad Mosque in its place, and in part out of the same stone. Within a generation of the death of Muhammad the Arabs had conquered an empire that stretched from Spain to the borders of China, the largest empire that had been seen up to that time. It was ruled from Mecca by companions of The Prophet for twenty-six years, but then `Ali, the fourth caliph and Muhammad's son-in-law, was overthrown by the governor of Damascus. For the next 90 years Damascus was the center of the world, the most powerful city in an empire that spanned half the globe. The Umayyad Mosque represents that period, and it is magnificent. The courtyard and the interior are huge, and have a very relaxed feel to them. It seemed a very human space, with men praying in one area, sitting around chatting in another, resting against the wall in a third.

I was amazed at a German man who had very obtrusive video equipment and was filming men praying from a few feet away. Outside in the courtyard I saw a number of men in rust and brown robes and sandals, looking like they had just come in from the country. I slyly snuck closer and took their picture. They saw me and gave me the thumbs up. A few minutes later an imam in a brown robe and a long beard was standing on the platform above the Ablutions Fountain in the center of the courtyard, as though about to give a sermon there. The German was ordering the ``men from the country" into position around the imam. They were extras in a movie he was making.

500s A.D.

My love of maps preceded and precipitated my love of travel. Maps I still have from my childhood have imaginary trips traced on them, and even today I will never throw a map away. I bring back maps from every trip, and if I see a map for sale of a place I've never been, I snatch it up. For this reason, one of the most exciting sights I saw in Jordan was also one of the smallest. It was a mosaic map in the town of Madaba from the 500s A.D. of Palestine, the mountains east of the Jordan, the Sinai, and the Nile Delta. You can pick out the names in Greek of Jerusalem and Jericho, labeling walled clumps of houses. There is a boat on the Dead Sea. Beyond the Dead Sea there is a lone fragment with the town of Karak, where I had just been. You can see Bethlehem and Hebron and bits of the Mediterranean. It was only fragmentary, but truly magnificent.

400s A.D.

In the early 400s A.D. a man known to later ages as Saint Simon Stylites retired from the city of Antioch into the hills to a place now known as San Simeon. In a weird notion of devotion typical of the time and the religion, he sat on top of a pillar for nearly 40 years. He somehow added to the height of the pillar as the years went on, his fame spread far and wide, and he became an object of pilgrimage, until the pillar reached over sixty feet. After he died, a church was built around the pillar, finished in 490 A.D., at the time the largest church in Christendom.

It is now in ruins, as is a companion church. The roofs have collapsed. Only a few walls and arches remain. All that's left of the pillar is a stub about six feet high. The site is quite charming on top of a hill surrounded by farmland spreading across lower hills.

Many Syrians I met considered San Simeon the most beautiful of the ruins in their country. For a Westerner it does not seem so remarkable; it is like many ruins of churches throughout Europe. I was reminded of Fountains Abbey in England. But then it came to me: this was seven hundred years older.

258-272 A.D.

Before going to Italy in 1970, I had read everything about Roman art and architecture and made a list of my favorites. Near the top of my list of Roman architectural monuments were the ruins of the city of Palmyra in Syria. They are, strictly speaking, Roman era rather than Roman. Palmyra was the center of a client state of Rome on its border with the Parthian Empire. It was the terminus of the frankincense trade across the Arabian Peninsula. Its period of glory was the middle 200s A.D. when its ruler Odenathus and then his widow Zenobia exploited a period of weakness in Rome and conquered most of the Roman Middle East. Because it is in the middle of a desert and, after the decline of the frankincense trade, a trading post of no importance, its ruins remained in a remarkable state of preservation. There are many ancient sites in the Middle East that require some knowledge of history and a considerable dose of imagination to appreciate. But Palmyra is not one of them. It strikes you right away with its well-preserved Temple of Bel, its acres and acres of pillars, a Y-shaped colonnade over a mile long, tall funerary towers on nearby hills, and a large Crusader-era castle dramatically perched on the peak of the tallest nearby mountain.

I arrived there about an hour and a half before sunset, one of the two best times of day to see it, when the slanting light turns everything red-orange. I explored the Temple of Bel and walked under the Triumphal Arch and halfway down the colonnaded street. I climbed up and down the steps of the theatre. Half an hour before dark I drove up to the castle for a view of the sunset lighting the ruins below. The pillars cast long shadows making them seem to leap out of the landscape. A large police escort arrived just before sunset, an entourage for the Austrian ambassador, who had picked tonight to see the ruins. I had a chance to stay a little longer; their cars blocked mine.

The next morning I returned to the ruins at sunrise and spent another couple of hours wandering around, nearly alone. I took photos of the Triumphal Arch in early morning sunshine, of pigeons flying above a colonnade, of pillars framed by arches, of the castle in the sunrise light. Back at the hotel, I climbed up onto the roof, picking my way through construction equipment, and took telephoto pictures of the entire site from a half mile away.

165-256 A.D.

From Palmyra, I drove east across the Syrian desert and then down the Euphrates River valley toward the Iraqi border. Here it was village after village, one with a lively market on the highway that I had to pick my way through scrupulously. I felt as if I had suddenly entered Africa it was that colorful and alive. As in India, the men were all in white, but the women wore bright colors of every hue, jalabiyyas and abbeyas rather than saris. Every woman seemed to have a baby in her arms.

Then the road left the valley and climbed to a high plateau. There in the distance were the huge imposing walls and main gate of Dura Europos.

The wall paintings of Dura Europos were high on my list of Roman paintings, and even though the paintings are now in the National Museum in Damascus, the city itself was a place I wanted to go, and I wondered if it would ever happen. Now my heart leapt that I was actually here.

I was the only tourist. The only other person was an old guard at the main gate, a large humorless man with an ancient long-barreled rifle. As I wandered around the ruins, I would look back and see him on the wall watching me. When my back was turned, I imagined that he had me in the sights of his rifle.

Other than the gate and wall, there is not much left of the city. It was primarily a Roman military outpost, and all that remained inside the walls were the low foundations of houses and temples. But even in this there is a message for the modern age. There was the synagogue in which the best of the wall paintings were found. Next to it was a Christian church. Farther down the wall was a Mithraic temple. Toward the center of the town were the temples of Jupiter and Artemis. This was not only an isolated outpost of the empire. It was a very cosmopolitan place, with representatives of the major races and religions of the day. Apparently, they lived together in peace, a lesson in tolerance for the modern age.

100s A.D.

In a way, the town of Bosra, a couple of hours southeast of Damascus, does not merely have layers of history; it's about layers of history. It has the most magnificent Roman theatre anywhere in the world. But from the outside it looks like a Crusader era castle. In fact, it was so huge and formidable that during the Crusader era it was used as a castle. Now when you walk in you see another layer of history--huge, side-by-side banners hung above the stage with pictures of Assad Senior and Junior. It was a discordant note-- literally. They were stretched between large metal pipes and as the wind blew the banners like large sails, the metal pipes banged against the basalt Roman backdrop, producing a harsh and chaotic music.

The modern town is built on top of the Roman town. That means the ancient and the current blend together almost seamlessly. City streets have been half excavated revealing the large Roman paving stones four feet below the modern asphalt. Roman streets are lined with ancient columns and modern shops. Modern houses exist side by side with the foundations of Roman houses. As you walk around, you can almost feel what it would have been like to walk around 1800 years ago. The town has a Christian and Muslim history as well. In 512 A.D. the Cathedral was the first place people put a round dome on a square church. Islamic tradition has it that in the Monastery, when Muhammad visited as a boy, a priest of the Nestorian sect recognized him as the Prophet. The mosque has been claimed to be one of the oldest in the world.

I heard celebrations--women ululating--in the distance, and I walked toward the sound. A would-be guide said, ``No, that's the New Town. Old Town this way." I ignored him and continued on until I came to a house where a large group of men had gathered. I stood outside until I was approached by a man who wanted to know if I wanted to photograph the event, a wedding party. I offered to send copies of the photos, and I was invited in. A man they called ``the boss" did a little dance and posed for me. I took a group picture of all the men. There were silver plates of food sitting on the ground all over the courtyard, and they invited me to kneel down and share a meal with them. There was a yellow rice base with yogurt mixed in, a leg of mutton, fatty and not well cooked, and dark brown egg-shaped items that were apparently the innards of sheep chopped up and baked. Everyone squatted around shared trays and reached in with their hands, picking up the rice with their fingers and rolling it into a ball in their palms before popping it into their mouths. I joined in.

100s A.D.

The town of Apamea, west of Hama on a hill overlooking the fertile Al-Ghab plain, was originally a Greek town, but what we see today are the remains of the Roman rebuilding of the city after an earthquake in 115 A.D. It flourished for 500 years after that, with a population of half a million, until the Persians and then the Muslims conquered it and allowed it to fall into decline. Nothing remains today but one very long street lined with pillars and a few foundations of buildings off to the side. I walked along the colonnaded street for at least half a mile, to a large portico, and then back. Then I drove on.

I drove south to the Masyaf-Hama road, turned east on that, and then turned north on a side road to avoid getting onto the freeway too soon. There I glanced to the west and saw the colonnades of Apamea in the distance, looking like a zipper between the nearby fields and the distant mountains.

15 B.C.-249 A.D.

Baalbek, in the Beqqa Valley of Lebanon, had been a religious site for eons before, and when the Romans came, they built their own massive temples there. I walked up the steps of the Propylaea, a magnificent entrance to the temple complex in the ``I'm bigger than you are" style of public architecture. The Hexagonal Court was pleasingly, well, hexagonal. In the Great Court I climbed up the relatively low Large Altar and the higher Small Altar, and took a photograph of half a dozen Syrian women scattered across the Monumental Stairway in gray and brown abeyyas with colorful scarves. The Temple of Jupiter, the centerpiece of the temple complex, has only six columns that remain standing, but they give a sense of how huge the temple once was. Each column is seven feet in diameter. The nearby Temple of Bacchus is one of the best-preserved Roman temples anywhere, with even part of the roof remaining, giving a rare view of a carved Roman ceiling.

170 B.C.-106 A.D.

If there were nothing there but the Siq, the narrow curving passage between two cliffs, if there were no ruins at the end, Petra would still be one of the wonders of the Middle East. I expected the Siq to be several hundred meters long, and at every turn I expected to reach the end. But it kept going on and on, for an entire kilometer before the pillars on the left side of the façade of the ``Treasury" broke into view. This is the most famous of the temples carved into the red cliffs, the temple where the Ark of the Covenant was found in ``Raiders of the Lost Ark". But it is only one small part of the huge complex at Petra. I spent a day and a half exploring the ruins, and there were still large areas that I missed completely. I did not see the Street of Façades in the best light; I walked along it in the late afternoon of two days and the early morning of the second when it was deep in shadow. But the large Greek theatre at the end of the street, carved out of the rock, was bathed in sunlight in the morning, as only I and four or five Chinese students in orange coats scrambled up and down the stairs. The Royal Tombs, beyond and across the wadi from the theatre turned orange and auburn in the sunset the first day and drew me back the second day.

The main part of the site is an ordinary Roman era ruin of a city. One small temple, the Southern Temple, has its walls still standing. A larger temple, the Great Temple, rises in tiers with some smaller temples embedded within it. You can view the subterranean Baths from above. The Colonnaded Street has few columns remaining, although the Nabataean era pavement is intact. The Triumphal Arch is no longer an arch. Across the wadi from all these ruins is a later Byzantine church with some very fine floor mosaics, including medallions of people and animals, camels with the spots of a giraffe, and a man pulling a camel laden with a log being pushed by another man.

The morning of my second day I set out up a path of stairs carved into the rock to the top of Jebel Madhbah. When I strayed from the path to explore the rock wilderness a bit, a Bedouin woman in a purple materialized and shouted to me, ``Mister! Mister! This way! Give me money!" From the top, at the High Place of Sacrifice, I could get a panoramic view of the principal parts of the site, from the Royal Tombs to the central city to the little visited tombs of Umm al-Biyara beyond the central city. I stopped in at a small tent café on top of the mountain, and then set off on the spectacular cliffside path down Wadi Farasa, with views of temples nestled in the narrow canyon below and tight steps down the cliff.

In the heat of the early afternoon I hiked for an hour up to the ``Monastery", another temple carved into a cliff and even finer than the Treasury though less dramatic in its setting. Three hundred meters beyond this one could stand on a rock and see the black mountains lead down to the flat valley that lies south of the Dead Sea and to the mountains of Israel beyond.

When I stood at the entrance to the Siq the first afternoon, I heard the clatter of hooves and then saw a galloping horse pulling a carriage emerge from the Siq, and the sound and the sight and the sense of place thrilled me to the bones. So the second afternoon, as I dragged myself through the Street of Façades one last time after climbing over the hills for twelve hours and I spotted a man with a horse and carriage, it was easy to convince myself that a ride was a necessary part of the Petra experience. I bargained him down and rode back to the entrance of the park. The ride was bumpy where the path through the Siq was smooth. Where we crossed Nabataean cobblestones it was far worse, the lurching of the carriage magnifying every bump and crack in the eroded stones, even though the horse slowed to a walk.

1300s-1200s B.C.

Ugarit flourished in the second millennium B.C., when it sat at the intersection of the Hittite-Egyptian and the Syrian-Cypriot trade routes. It was a town of 7000, controlling a territory with 50,000. They had one of the earliest systems of alphabetic writing, and the name of a scribe survives--Ilimalku, who wrote down a cycle of myths about the god Baal in the 1200s B.C. Ugarit was destroyed by the Sea People--the Philistines--who invaded the eastern Mediterranean after the collapse of the Achaean civilization in Greece.

Today it is only low stone foundations, and a gate that I found impressive but that Lonely Planet compares to a culvert. So it is one of those places you need to bring some knowledge and imagination to. A couple of streets were evident, and otherwise, labels helped. Here was the Royal Palace, and up there was the Temple of Baal on the Acropolis. Standing on the Acropolis, I got my first glimpse of the Mediterranean on this trip.

Ugarit was most remarkable for a treasure trove found there in a small and very unremarkable room that I walked into--30,000 cuneiform tablets. Much of what we know of the period is what we learned from those tablets.

1700s B.C.

Near the Iraqi border in the Euphrates valley I visited the ancient site of Mari. This is another place that requires a lot of imagination. A cuneiform tablet found in Babylon at the time of Hammurabi the Lawgiver, in the 1700s B.C., is a letter from an ambassador to Mari, describing the magnificence of the palace he found there belonging to their king Zimri-Lin. Mari was a major principality on the trade route along the Fertile Crescent between Mesopotamia and Egypt from the middle of the third millennium B.C. until it was destroyed by Hammurabi in 1751 B.C.

Today it is a low hill of mud. I descended a flight of stairs that had been chipped into the mud, and I felt with every step I was going back in time several centuries. I suppose archaeologists can tell whether the mud they are digging through was once mud brick rather than merely mud; I couldn't. In any case, under a large translucent tarp were several large connected rooms with high walls, and I tried to imagine it filled with the trappings and court of Zimri-Lin. I walked around outside--outlines of rooms and low walls. I saw a shard of pottery embedded in the mud, and looked at it in wonder. It was a very ordinary piece of pottery. But it was nearly 4000 years old.

2500-2000 B.C.

Ebla is yet another place you have to bring your imagination to. It was only discovered in the 1960s, by a group of Italian archaeologists. The existence of Ebla somewhere was known from Babylonian cuneiform tablets, and northern Syria is dotted with low hills, called tells, which are actually the remains of many layers of settlement over the millennia. But until the 1960s it was not known which one was Ebla.

Ebla is still very much under excavation. When I got there, there was a bucket brigade of men hauling rubber buckets of dirt out of an excavation and onto a truck. It made a great picture, so I took it, and then I moved into position for a better angle. As I was about to push the shutter, a man in the middle of the chain shouted, ``No photo!" I snapped. He went ballistic, cursing me in Arabic and throwing the bucket of dirt he had just been handed back into the pit. I tried to shrug an apology, and I walked sheepishly away the opposite direction.

This incident made me uneasy as I explored the rest of the site. But to be honest there is not much there. The foundations of a temple or two have been excavated. Just below the central hill a residential district or maybe a part of a palace has been excavated, and the mud brick walls have been covered with plaster to protect them from the elements. A gate has been excavated near the periphery.

But the excitement of Ebla is knowing what it is. We all know about the Fertile Crescent stretching from Sumeria in present-day Iraq to the Nile Valley, and we all know that this is where Western/Middle Eastern civilization began. But what was going on in the middle of that crescent, the part that goes through northern Syria? The answer is Ebla. In the third millennium B.C. Ebla was the center of a kingdom that controlled all of northern Syria, and mediated the trade between Mesopotamia and Egypt. It fell into decline around 2000 B.C., rose to prominence again in the middle of the second millennium B.C., and was finally destroyed by the Hittites.

2500 B.C.

The National Museum in Damascus does not present Syria's rich history well. The flow through the museum is not chronological, so you can step from Ebla to the Ottoman era. The lighting is poor. Less than half the displays are labeled at all, and most of those only in Arabic. There is an occasional French label, and a rare English one. The sculpture garden surrounding the museum is pleasant enough, but not educational, since busts and plinths are scattered at random without regard to provenance.

Nevertheless, there are a few real treasures. Some excellent statuettes from Mari are on display, and in particular a two-foot high statue of King Iku-Shamagen of Mari, with alabaster eyes and bitumen for pupils; he ruled around 2500 B.C. There are some remarkably preserved textiles from Palmyra, including silks imported from China. The Hypogeum from a funerary tower of Palmyra has been reconstructed in the museum. Individual niche graves are covered by sculpted busts of the deceased. There were some large wall paintings in an out-of-the-way room that a guard was anxious to draw the curtains to show me. The Synagogue of Dura Europos has been reassembled here, with remarkable wall paintings of Samuel anointing David, the history of Esther, and the parting of the Red Sea.

8000-6000 B.C.

The National Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan, is small and mostly unexceptional. But worth the visit were some flat statues of men, some two-headed, with bitumen eyes, from `Ain Ghazal from 8000 to 6000 B.C. They were very reminiscent of Cycladic statues I had seen in the Athens museum, but these were 5000 years earlier. The Cycladic sculptors were closer in time to us than they were to the `Ain Ghazal artists.

7000 B.C.

After a day spent hiking around Petra, I drove north 8 kilometers to the site of the Beidha Neolithic Village. I parked and followed a dusty track for half a mile or so and then cut over large flat rocks on a goat trail, past a large Bedouin tent and to the archaeological site, a village from around 7000 B.C., a time when permanent villages had first sprung into existence around the new technology of agriculture. It was just a pile of rocks, really, although you could discern bits of a street and the foundations of some rooms. It was already darkening, and a full moon shone over the nearby Bedouin tent and several more in the distance.

As I walked back past the Bedouin tent, a boy and a girl and their mother invited me in for tea. I accepted. I sat down hard on the cushions that lined the edge of the tent and scraped my left elbow badly on a low rock wall I hadn't seen. The mother looked concerned. I said I was okay. She said almost to herself, ``Man," which I took to mean, ``Men don't cry." The tent was of black wool, large in area, and not quite high enough for me to stand in. Almost no possessions. In the center of the tent was a small fire on the sand with a teakettle sitting on the embers. She gave me a cup. ``Bedouin tea," she said, although it tasted like every other cup of tea I had drunk lately.

There were six children in the tent. I asked their ages. A boy 14, a girl 11, boys 8 and 5, a 3-year-old girl, and a nursing baby of 7 months. She said she also had an older boy. She said she was 29. I didn't do the arithmetic until later. She must have had the first of her seven children when she was 13 or 14.

I mostly talked to the 11-year-old girl and the 8-year-old boy in their sparse English and my sparse Arabic. The mother knew English words, not sentences, and I don't know what she understood. The kids showed me their schoolbooks, one Arabic and one English. ``This is a book," in the 8-year-old's workbook. They went to school in the nearby village of El-Beidha. The 14-year-old had to travel 8 kilometers to the town of Wadi Musa, by Petra, for high school. The woman offered and I accepted another cup of tea. I asked if I could take a picture of her and her family--``Mumkin sura al-kul?" (Perhaps picture everyone?) She was reluctant, but the kids were so enthusiastic she acquiesced. I said ``Ursiil." (I send.) But she said to bring it with me the next time I came. I paid her for the tea, thanked her, and left.

On the way back to my car, I wondered how different her life was from the lives of the people of that Neolithic village.


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Next: Finding My Way in Up: The Middle East in Previous: Aleppo Encounters
Jerry Hobbs 2004-02-10