You might be thinking that I'm not going off-piste at all -- that I am, in fact, on a well-trodden piste as an archaeologist writing about living and working in the Middle East and North Africa. Just part of the job, really. But no, it's not like that. When I go to strange lands, I'm far removed from my own digging grounds. And the ruins of caravan cities that lure me year after year serve to switch on my aesthetic, rather than my professional, passions.

Yet today, when anyone can travel anywhere, and when everyone with a fondness for archaeological souvenirs can be a cultural tourist, it may be difficult to understand what I mean by my travels. They are certainly not visits to Petra or Palmyra for the day, with perhaps a night or two spent at a comfortable new hotel just off site; nor hardship journeys into remote areas still untravelled or hardly explored (usually with good reason).

Rather, they elicit the somewhat unfashionable notion that if you spend months at a time at one place, you can dig deeper, reaching beyond the tourist image towards its genius.

The reality of this travelling does mean accepting, if not especially seeking, the unpleasantness of an often-uncomfortable billet. But it's a fair trade-off to be on site in the empty moonlight, walking through temples in the utter stillness of the night and coming close to the unsayable.

There are some travelling rules, though, that I've learnt from living in Mediterranean lands -- my own near-abroad -- for more years than I ever lived at home.

"There are two things you don't need in an Arabian land," the Dutch Ambassador once told me. "Your heavy winter coat and the word why. Hang them both on a coat rack and leave them behind."

Despite the high authority of His Excellency, the former ambassador to Bahrain, Beirut and Tehran, I have never listened to this advice. Perhaps because the why of things is a driving force in my life -- it underlies my urge to travel, to cross chancy borders and to plonk myself down at the edge of another society, daring myself to become part of those bewitching lands: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya.

Never have I asked why as often or as wistfully as in Libya. The question received an answer of sorts in a huge concrete block of a hotel sited in an overgrown village, 800km (500 miles) from Tripoli and almost as far as you can get from the inhabited world. Larger-than-life portraits of the Great Leader, Muammar Gaddafi, covered the walls. Lunch was in a monstrously grand dining hall with rococo chairs, plastic flowers on every table and bowing waiters. For whom? Not a soul sat there but a Dutch artist, an archaeologist and our driver.

"Why was this hotel built here?" I asked.

The driver replied knowingly: "Just in case."

This cryptic statement became my travelling leitmotiv. In the Arab world, you never know if you'll get your visa, if a minister will grant permission, or if the smiling colonel will always smile with you over tea. Never knowing, you'll be ready for anything, just in case.

"Pass the condiment tray," I said to the Dutch artist as I looked at the brown sludge quivering on my plate. It was Egypt during the winter of 1983-84. We had made ourselves at home at the Hotel Habu (now lamentably closed), in two rooms on a terrace overhanging the massive enclosure walls of Medinet Habu in a deserted West Thebes. From this height, I spent hours trying to catch the reliefs of Rameses III in the shifting of the light. The sharp sun made these walls dark; and out of this darkness, new forms constantly emerged.

Never travel without a condiment tray. However dispiriting the boiled camel meat or quivering sludge, there's nothing that can't be improved with a condiment tray: abundant garlic, sambal oelek (Indonesian chili and lime sauce), sambal udang (chili, oil, garlic and crushed shrimp), sambal badjak (the darkest there is, just like it sounds), and lime oil pickle. And Dutch water. Wherever you go, bring Dutch water (also known as genever). Even to Libya. Especially to Libya! But also for a nip at the roadside stalls with burnt unspeakable bits on the fire -- when you need all three sambals and an added slug of crystal-clear NL H2O.

Once, just outside Petra, we celebrated having survived three months alone in Nazal's Camp, a wonderful crumbling edifice, monastic in austerity and a good deal dirtier - a memorable winter of paraffin stoves, snow on the hills and distant wolves. A new restaurant was still in the project stage and would open, the owner averred, as soon as they fixed the plumbing; but for us, anything! So we ate roast lamb seated at a table and on real chairs, while on either side open sewers went sloshing through the soon-to-be dining room. This was nothing that NL H2O couldn't fix, and I still don't remember how we made it back to camp.

That was 1990. We had moved to Nazal's Camp to escape the goats. I needed to remind myself of the goats whenever, as was often, the generator sputtered and the lights went out. The previous year, we had rented a house in the Bedouin village of Umm Sehun, high above Petra. Instead of rent, we paid the village chief, the muktar, to repair the roof and walls and install kitchen and sanitary facilities -- the latter a contradiction in terms as the bathroom was the preferred cooling-off spot for the muktar's goats; there was no glass in the windows. As a rule, too, they were fed, loudly farting as goats will, on the terrace outside the bedrooms.

So we were now alone all winter at the end of the Roman road, nearly dwarfed by the massive Kasr el-Bint, temple of the god Dushara. We sat on his vast altar in companionable silence while the guards emptied the site of visitors, and twilight came.

When the Nabataeans began to build in Petra, they hacked the fabric out of the hillsides in such a way that the structures emerge from the sandstone as if they are part of the mountains themselves. Their theatres, houses, palaces, temples, tombs and the columns and pillars of their antechambers are all carved out of the same living rock.

It is a city of many colours. You walk over veins of red, white, yellow and blue, with stripes of purple or violet here and there. Small wonder that the Nabataeans knew their city as Raqmu, "the many-coloured"; it was the Greeks who called it Petra, "the rock". Both names are truths.

Two millennia ago, for the briefest historical moment, caravans came down these roads on their interminable way from China to Rome. The caravans arrived on the fringes of Western history only after taking to the sea off the Indian coast: two drawn-out routes of silks and spices, one coming to embellish Petra, the other to make the desert bloom at Palmyra.

In Palmyra, we found ourselves at the archaeological dig-house within the sanctuary of the Temple of Bel. This, too, had once been a muktar's dwelling, a handsome building surrounding a courtyard planted with date palms and terebinth trees; from the terrace the ruins spread out in front of us, and its other side looked out over the remains of the oasis.

We were lucky. When we first arrived in February, we were the only visitors and so could take all three rooms over the courtyard facing west, keeping the afternoon sun for ourselves. In the dig-house, we had a house servant who spent his days watering the garden and spying on our every move. This was a time when faxes were forbidden in Syria because the mukhabarat (secret police) hadn't figured out how to read them, as they were required to do with all foreign letters. Of course, our servant knew no Dutch -- it was our secret language. In English, we used codes. We would never refer to the unmentionable Zionist entity by name -- that could cause trouble - but to "Dixie" (the other side of the Mason-Dixon line) or "across the big J".

Occasionally, there were other guests, classicists or archaeologists. Grateful as we were for conversational company, we nonetheless put a lock on our shower and toilet door; yes, we expropriated it. It was Dutch-cleaned, and I have stayed in too many dig-houses to be charitable.

On 6 April 1996, the ancient Babylonian New Year, with a full moon looking down on us, we sat in the Temple of Bel reading aloud from the Epic of Creation:

When skies above were not yet namedNor earth below pronounced by name

Illuminated by our candles, we sat in the high south chapel, reached by means of a purloined ladder.

The next year was remarkable for the two-tailed comet that hovered every night over the Temple of Bel until the very last weeks of our stay. Sitting on the terrace of the dig-house, staring out at the utterly dark and silent temple, it was easy to think of portents, and how the cosmic indifference of Hale-Bopp would once have foretold the death of kings and the fall of empires. We could almost reach out and touch that ancient world, when every sign was meaningful.

Leaving Palmyra in late 1998, as once freight-laden camels began the next lap of the Silk Road, we climbed up the Beq'a Valley to the temple city of Baalbek, set in a wide valley beneath snow-capped mountains, with cool rivulets of water and perpetually bubbling springs. The city of the Sun: Heliopolis. The vast temples of Baalbek, constructed in the course of the first two centuries of our era, were given over to Roman gods -- Jupiter, Venus, Mercury -- strangely transplanted to the highest ridge of the Beq'a. It is remarkable that, even after 1,000 years of Greek and Roman rule, Baal's name and dignity would return to his ancestral city.

In the end, a journey matters for the friends we meet -- warm friendships that do not grow from dropping in, but from returning. At Baalbek one night, our friend Haris exclaimed about our staying there: "Just a few of us stayed on in the years of war when almost nobody was here: drug dealers; some arms dealers; everybody else who could went to Europe or America; a few come back now, but Hezbollah ... you know."

Of course Baalbek, after 25 years of Lebanon's civil war, has added a strange tone to its beauty, like the light of a dead star. We are not fools. Baalbek is the headquarters of Hezbollah, and renting a house and staying there, two women alone, warranted careful consideration. But learned Western women and artists have the status of honorary men in the Middle East, seen as strong but aberrant -- a third gender, possibly. Nonetheless, whether empresses or charladies, whatever women do, in the Orient they are still women. So our good friend Hikmet, a journalist with an inside track to Hezbollah, would be our early-warning system ("just in case"): if we were no longer safe, we would expect a telephoned "pack up and get out quick".

We always listened to the BBC World Service. "No news is good news" when it comes to Baalbek, Lebanon or even Dixie for that matter. We may have been listening to world radio, but the BBC programmes were sporadically interrupted by flashes of a male voice reciting over and over: "Charlie, Bravo, Charlie, Bravo, Tango, Charlie, Bravo, Tango." Perhaps that was why, when the attack finally came, we were taken by surprise.

We had rented a house in what was once the Christian quarter of the town, overlooking some still-standing columns of the garbage-strewn Roman forum. Big and airy, but badly decayed, a house left to rot since its sale for a peppercorn when the Christians packed up and left. We made it habitable.

Work and study were punctuated by distant shellfire. I learnt willy-nilly to identify that famous artillery "crump", and the Israeli Air Force's retaliatory "ga-boom". Bombs fell one night in the Beq'a, about 25km (16 miles) from us, outside a Jesuit monastery, over the walls from its agricultural college, where they teach the care and feeding of 195 Dutch cows. Ten Hezbollah fighters were killed when Israeli smart bombs hit their base, so close that the cows stopped giving milk. Sensible animals! If only others would go on strike against such tit-for-tat slaughter -- a kind of mooing Lysistrata.

One night we were shaken out of bed by explosions. Grasping a bottle of French cognac, we sat outside on the terrace hearing the Israeli jets on their way to the electricity plant 1km (1100 yards) outside the town. The house shook when they hit their target and fireworks lit up the sky as Hezbollah responded with wild anti-aircraft fire from weapons everyone knew were hidden in the city's garbage dump. The display went on for an hour or more. The cognac finished, we went to bed. The Dutch Ambassador was not pleased that we had watched the show outdoors. "Young ladies," he scolded, "what goes up can come down."

A few days later, we drove past Hezbollah headquarters, a dim complex of buildings with black flags flying, next door to an ice-cream shop in the centre of town.

"Why?" I asked the Dutch artist.

"Put it back on the coat rack," she said.

Cicero says somewhere that there is nothing whatsoever so beautiful but that our imagination and our mind cannot conceive of something still more beautiful. And he was right: We surely can, and it's over that hill ... and in the next country.

Judith Weingarten is an Aegean archaeologist and member of the British School at Athens. She is the author of a number of books, including Sign of Taurus: The Archaeological Worlds of Gerti Bierenbroodspot (1998), which describes some of her travels with the Dutch painter.

Illustration

The intrepid author writing Chronicle of Zenobia: The Rebel Queen outside our house in Baalbek, with a Latin Loeb as prop, 1999. Credit: Gerti Bierenbroodspot

The image reveals a small region inside this massive globular cluster, a giant ball of millions of stars that orbits the Milky Way. All the dots are stars in the cluster, which orbits our galaxy. Omega Centuri boasts nearly 10 million stars, between 10 billion and 12 billion years old.

This image alone shows about 100,000 stars at all stages of evolution, from slowly glowing yellow to furiously churning red — stars at the ends of their lives, about to burn out out into tiny, hot white dwarfs (= the faint blue dots in the image). White dwarfs no longer generate energy and have gravitationally contracted to the size of Earth. Tiny, as they say. These will continue to cool and grow dimmer for many billions of years until they become dark cinders. The snap also shows sapphire blue stars, helium-rich objects also nearing cosmic senescence but having picked up a new lease on life when they collided and merged with other stars. Those encounters boost the stars' energy-production rate, making them appear bluer. All of these are phases of evolution that many stars eventually go through.

If anyone lived in Omega Centauri (which we should be thankful they don't), they would behold a star-saturated sky that is roughly 100 times brighter than Earth's sky. From our vantage point, on the other hand, this is one of the few clusters that can be seen even with the unaided eye -- the 24th brightest object in the constellation Centaurus, resembling a small cloud in the southern sky that might easily be mistaken for a comet.

Hubble's new view of a spiral galaxy in living colour

This is NGC 6217, a relatively close spiral galaxy (at a distance of roughly 80 million light years) in the north circumpolar constellation Ursa Major. You can easily spot huge numbers of glowing pink star-forming areas, where stars are being born in prodigious quantities. And even from this vast distance — 800 quintillion kilometres (500 quintillion miles) — Hubble can still pick out individual stars in the spiral arms. The brightest ones are the stars that will someday explode as monstrous supernovae.

Actually, since the light is 80 million years old, perhaps most of the big visible stars have already exploded and the light just hasn’t made it to Hubble yet.

To put this in a little perspective, you can see some other galaxies waaaay off in the distance behind NGC 6217.

Just a tiny Hubble piece of the universe, really.

Scientists seem to like to use the word Awesome. Zenobia can understand why.

*Next week I promise to get back on topic with the historical Zenobia in some guise or other. But 2,000 years ago suddenly seems such a piddling time scale.I'll have to get used to it again.

My thanks to Julianne at Cosmic Variance for awesome reporting and to Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy for much-needed background; and additional thanks to some of those who commented on both blogs.Illustrations

09 September 2009

The Aram Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies announces a new series of conferences on the subject of Zoroastrianism. The first, which will be held in Oxford on 5-7 July 2010, aims to study Zoroastrian religion and culture throughout the Levant. The emphasis will be on exploring how Zoroastrianism interacted with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Gnosticism and ancient Near Eastern non-biblical religions. Cultural interaction is the keynote.

Who is Aram?

Aram takes its name from "Aramaic" -- the Semitic language which was a focal point of ancient Syro-Mesopotamian cultures from the 8th century BC, when it became the official and commercial lingua franca of the Near East,* until the 7th-10th century AD when it was extensively replaced by Arabic following the spread of Islam. Aramaic was influenced at first by Akkadian, then from the 5th century BC by Persian, and from the 3rd century BC onwards by Greek, as well as by Hebrew, especially in Palestine. In the time of Jesus, it was widely spoken (as well as written) throughout the Semitic area and it was, of course, the language of Zenobia and the main tongue of Palmyra. It still survives today (as Syriac and Mandaic), especially for religious rites, in some scattered places.

Aram is not confined solely to Aramaic studies, however, but deals with all the cultures that were influenced by Aramaic civilisation across the greater Syro-Mesopotamian region and the so-called Fertile Crescent -- a great swath of territory over thousands of years.

In fact, as we learn from their website, the Aram Society is building the foundation for the study of continuity between the Aramaic culture and other Syro-Mesopotamian civilisations. Past conferences showed how closely intertwined they are, and that Aramaic civilisation would not have flourished without this intellectual cross-fertilisation. The many connections between the different cultures demonstrate that the Syro-Mesopotamian man** is born out of a process of uninterrupted cultural continuity since the beginning of history.

Zoroastrianism is just one piece of the puzzle along this cultural continuum.

Zenobia and Zoroastrianism

Zenobia has not neglected Zoroastrianism either.

Some background on the tight links between the Sassanian-Persian Zoroastrian religion and the Kings of Kings (Church and state were born of one womb, joined together never to be sundered) is described in Zoroastrian Stuff.

Then, Zenobia told the story of Tansar, the chief 'teaching priest,' and how he restored the true faith after the depredations of Accursed Alexander and his successors, in Zoroastrian Stuff II:

Do not marvel, Tansar says, "at my zeal and ardour for promoting order inthe world, that the foundations of the laws of the Faith may be madefirm. It is as if I heard the voices [of the spirits of the virtuousdead] uttering praise, and saw the gladness and radiance of theircountenances. When we are united we shall speak of what we have doneand be glad.

And, finally, in Zoroastrian Stuff III , Zenobia covered the astonishing 'autobiography' written on a rock relief by the Chief Magus-Priest, Kirdir, who boasted of having established orthodoxy and persecuted heretics: From the beginning I, Kirdir, have laboured hard for the sake of the gods, rulers, and my own soul.Cultural Interaction in Oxford

Scholars are invited to submit papers for the Aram Society's 2010 conference.

Dr Abouzayd has kindly confirmed to me that non-specialists interested in the subject will be welcome to attend. I hope to be there.

* Circa 700 BC, the ambassadors of the Assyrian King Sennacherib and the son of the Judaean King Hezekiah negotiated in Aramaic before the walls of Jerusalem when they didn't want to be understood by the population: "Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the [Aramaic] Syrian tongue; for we understand it: and talk not with us in the Jews' language in the ears of the people that are on the wall." (2 Kings 18:26). A few hundred years later, it was the language of the people.

** I trust that Aram includes the female sex under the rubric of 'the Syro-Mesopotamian man'.

My note on Aramaic is based on K. Beyer, The Aramaic Language: its distribution and sub-divisions, Göttingen, 1986.

Illustrations

Above: Farashband Fire Tower (Firuzabad, Iran)

Below: Kirdir pictured behind the investiture scene showing Ardashir I, founder of the dynasty, receiving 'Divine Grace' from Hormizd, the highest god. Kirdir salutes both king and god with his right fist and pointed index finger, a sign of respect and obedience. In front of him is a long text, which tells us who he is and something of what he did.

06 September 2009

I'm just back from Rome and, as you can see, not quite ready to restart blogging.

This tree frog, plopped on a bamboo chair in a nearby garden, has no desire to get back to work either. Just as lazy as I was in Rome ... she stayed put until a friend brought her camera from the house and shot -- photographically speaking -- the sweet amphibian.

Since I dubbed her a Zenobia frog, she must be a she. According to Wikipedia, European males of tree-frog varieties can be distinguished from females by their browny-yellowy, large (folded) vocal sacs in the throat region. So, Zenobia she is! Unlike the boys, she need not croak. She emits soft vibrations.

Like life in Rome.

She will have to hold the fort until I get cracking.

My thanks to Margôt Hover for this photograph taken down in the valley.

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About Me

I studied Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford (M.Litt.) and am a member of the British School at Athens. I excavated for many years on Crete and on the Greek mainland and travelled extensively in the Middle East. I have lived and worked among the ruins of the three great Caravan Cities: Petra, Palmyra, and Baalbek. It was at Palmyra in Syria that I began to tell the story of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, and the rebellion that she led against imperial Rome. I was living within the grounds of the Temple of Bel, and at night, when the great gates of the temple were shut, I came closer to the spirit of the time and place than probably anyone has ever done before. I know that I felt very close to Zenobia, which made the book a joy for me to write.

IS THIS ZENOBIA'S REAL PORTRAIT?

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These are five blogs I enjoy reading the most, and without which life would be less interesting for me: David Meadows' Rogue Classicism is my number one go-to blog.... My second choice is Judith Weingarten's Zenobia - she covers strong ancient women, not just Zenobia, and since these warrior women are the subject of my next book, I love her lengthy well-researched posts. PHDiva"Judith Weingarten, author of The Chronicle of Zenobia: The Rebel Queen writes about gods, kings, war and chivalry here. Written with pace and verve it is a fantastic and exciting analysis."Mike @ Official Osprey Publishing Blog

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"Judith's blog, Zenobia: Empress of the East is a treasure trove of insights into early history, but also the explorers, scholars and archaeologists who uncovered the ancient world."Martin@The Lay Scientist