Rubina Raja

Revealing text in a complexly rolled silver scroll from Jerash with computed tomography and advanced imaging software

Throughout Antiquity magical amulets written on papyri, lead and silver were used for apotropaic reasons. While papyri often can be unrolled and deciphered, metal scrolls, usually very thin and tightly rolled up, cannot easily be unrolled without damaging the metal. This leaves us with unreadable results due to the damage done or with the decision not to unroll the scroll. The texts vary greatly and tell us about the cultural environment and local as well as individual practices at a variety of locations across the Mediterranean. Here we present the methodology and the results of the digital unfolding of a silver sheet from Jerash in Jordan from the mid-8th century CE. The scroll was inscribed with 17 lines in presumed pseudo-Arabic as well as some magical signs. The successful unfolding shows that it is possible to digitally unfold complexly folded scrolls, but that it requires a combination of the know-how of the software and linguistic knowledge.

Mosaicists at work: the organisation of mosaic production in Early Islamic Jerash

Abstract The city of Jerash in northern Jordan was badly damaged by an earthquake in AD 749. As a result of this, many parts of the city, including the Northwest Quarter, were abandoned and further construction ceased. Archaeological excavations in those parts of the city therefore reveal snapshots in time from the moment at which disaster hit. Of particular interest is the so-called ‘House of the Tesserae’, where archaeologists discovered a trough for the storage of pieces to be used in the construction of mosaics. The find, reported here for the first time, provides a unique insight into the practice of mosaic-laying during the Early Islamic Period.

A newly excavated private house in Jerash. Reconsidering aspects of continuity and change in material culture from Late Antiquity to the early Islamic period

Depuis 2011, le Projet germano-danois du quartier nord-ouest de Gerasa mene des recherches archeologiques sur la zone la plus elevee de l’ancienne ville enceinte. En 2014, les fouilles ont debute sur la « terrasse orientale », qui s’etend sur environ 3 000 m2 et surplombe l’Artemision d’epoque romaine. Cette zone etait recouverte par d’importants deblais qui enfermaient les vestiges d’un habitat domestique du debut de l’epoque islamique, detruit par le tremblement de terre de 749 et jamais reoccupe depuis. Une maison privee a ete en partie fouillee (secteur K). Elle ne recouvre aucune phase ni romaine ni byzantine et a ete abandonnee a la suite du tremblement de terre avec l’ensemble de son mobilier. L’absence de phases chronologiques anterieures, le mobilier ainsi que la destruction soudaine de cette habitation en font un exemple important qui permet d’entreprendre une etude des permanences et des changements de la culture materielle de l’Antiquite tardive au debut de l’epoque islamique. L’habitat et les...

City and wadi: Exploring the environs of Jerash

Archaeological excavations of urban sites in the Mediterranean have a long history, but only recently are geoarchaeology-based landscape studies beginning to provide insight into the complex and dynamic relationships between cities and their hinterlands. Such studies are becoming increasingly important as archaeologists seek to understand how cities sustained themselves, demonstrating resilience to both external shocks and long-term environmental changes, and, conversely, how cities contributed to their own demise through the over-exploitation of environmental resources (Barthel & Isendahl 2013; Butzer et al. 2013; Kintigh et al. 2014; Nelson et al. 2016).

An architectural block with altar-iconography from the North-west Quarter of Jerash

Abstract This article considers a monumental architectural limestone block with altar-iconography that was found during the 2012 campaign of the Danish–German North-west Quarter project. The project, which began in 2011, has mapped the highest area within the walled city, the so-called North-west Quarter, which had hitherto remained largely unexplored. The monumental block, which was in secondary use as a late antique oil press, gives new insight into the local building traditions in Gerasa. The authors suggest that this block originally came from a building with a sacred function. Through comparison with other local sanctuaries from the region, as well as from Gerasa itself where the tradition of the horned altar-motif seems to have been flourishing in the Roman period, it is shown that this block might have belonged to a sanctuary dedicated to a deity of a local character.

Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach

ABSTRACT For the past five years (2012–2017), the Max Weber Center of Erfurt University has hosted a project on ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “cults” and “polis religion”’, financed by the European Research Council and embedded in the research group on ‘Religious individualisation in historical perspective’ (see Fuchs and Rüpke. [2015. “Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective.” Religion 45 (3): 323–329. doi:10.1080/0048721X.2015.1041795]). It was designed to supplement existing accounts of the religious history of the Mediterranean area at the time of the long Roman Empire, accounts traditionally centred upon public or civic institutions. The new model focuses on the interaction of individuals with a variety of religious specialists and traditions, taking the form of material culture, spaces and text. It emphasises religious experience, embodiment and ‘culture in interaction’. On the basis of research into the history of religion of the Roman Empire, this co-authored article sets out to offer new tools for research into religion by formulating three major perspectives, namely religious agency, instantiated religion and narrated religion. We have tried to illustrate their potential value by means of 13 short case studies deriving from different geographical areas of the central and eastern Mediterranean area, and almost all relating to the period 150 BCE to 300 CE. These short descriptions are summarising research pursued by the members of the team of authors, published or to be published in extended form elsewhere, as indicated by the references.

Mapping an ancient city with a century of remotely sensed data

Significance Understanding how people in the past adapted to environmental and economic challenges can help us anticipate and meet these challenges in the present. However, these very processes threaten the physical remains embodying this information worldwide: Urban expansion and resource exploitation mean that the quantity and quality of archaeological information are diminishing daily. In this work, we demonstrate how multitemporal aerial photography and modern airborne laser scanning are invaluable tools for mapping the remaining archaeological features extant in the present and for adding context to them from what has been lost. This knowledge enables cultural heritage administrators and archaeologists to actively monitor, understand, and manage the existing remains to make sure important information is not lost to posterity. The rapidly growing global population places cultural heritage at great risk, and the encroachment of modern settlement on archaeological sites means that valuable information about how past societies worked and interacted with the environment is lost. To manage and mitigate these risks, we require knowledge about what has been lost and what remains, so we can actively decide what should be investigated and what should be preserved for the future. Remote sensing provides archaeologists with some of the tools we need to do this. In this paper we explore the application of multitemporal, multisensor data to map features and chart the impacts of urban encroachment on the ancient city of Jerash (in modern Jordan) by combining archives of aerial photography dating back to 1917 with state-of-the-art airborne laser scanning. The combined results revealed details of the water distribution system and the ancient city plan. This demonstrates that by combining historical images with modern aerial and ground-based data we can successfully detect and contextualize these features and thus achieve a better understanding of life in a city in the past. These methods are essential, given that much of the ancient city has been lost to modern development and the historical imagery is often our only source of information.

Compilation and digitisation of the Palmyrene corpus of funerary portraits

Since 2012, the ‘Palmyra Portrait Project’ has collected, studied and digitised over 3700 limestone funerary portraits from Palmyra dating to the first three centuries AD. This represents the largest collection of funerary representations from one place in the classical world.

Martha Sharp Joukowsky. Petra Great Temple volume 3: Brown University excavations 1993–2008, architecture and material culture. 2016. xxiv+598 pages, numerous bw 978-1-78570-612-7 hardback £60.

quarters for a military guard are not out of place in imperial villas (e.g. Cercadilla in Spain, Mediana in Serbia), the poor amenities (earth floors) and the small finds (showing the presence of women, and with no hint of the military at all) suggest that this building is rare evidence for the slaves’ or attendants’ quarters on a great landed estate. The discovery of seven child burials under the floors, while attested at Roman villas in other regions (e.g. Hambleden in England), is unique for Italy; it too points to a civilian use for the building. The children all suffered from anaemic thalassaemia, suggesting the presence of families brought in from a coastal region: they were not locals.

The “Beauty of Palmyra” and Qasr Abjad (Palmyra): new discoveries in the archive of Harald Ingholt

Over recent decades an immense amount of scholarship on Palmyra has appeared, but remarkably little of it has concerned the city’s distinctive art. In the English-speaking world the groundbreaking handbook by M. A. R. College, The art of Palmyra (1976), remains the standard work, as a successor to the first major effort in this field, Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur (1928), by H. Ingholt, itself still a basic work on the chronology of funerary portraiture. Ingholt (1896–1985) had conducted three excavation campaigns (1924, 1925, 1928) at Palmyra. Alongside his excavations he prepared an archive of more than 800 Palmyrene funerary portraits with photographs of most, as well as bibliographic references and his own datings; he used this archive as the basis for his book. His detailed diaries of his excavation campaigns are also held in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. In them he described some of his finds, including sculptures and inscriptions. Many of these pieces were published by him in Berytus , but a number were not. From the diaries it has been possible to locate a number of tombs and set additional sculptures within their original contexts.