Zbigniew T. Fiema

STORING IN THE CHURCH: ARTEFACTS IN ROOM I OF THE PETRA CHURCH

Excavations of some Byzantine churches in Palestine and Jordan have revealed the existence of stored material in rooms adjacent to the churches. Room I of the Petra church yielded a particularly interesting corpus of material, ranging from papyrus scrolls through glass and metal objects to wooden storage furniture, which provided the opportunity for a detailed study of artefacts and their spatial relationships, both to each other and to their architectural context. The following text summarises this discovery, concentrating on patterns of storage and changes in the function of Room I within the framework of the history of the Petra church.

A Second Nabataean Inscription from Tell esh-Shuqafiya, Egypt

A second early Nabataean inscription from Tell esh-Shuqafiya, Egypt, is part of the established collection of the Matḥaf Hariyyat Raznah, Zagazig. Other information concerning the provenance of the inscription is vague or lacking. The inscription was written in Nisan, 36 B. C., and dated to the reigns of Cleopatra VII, Malichus I King of the Nabataeans, and a certain ʾṭlh, apparently a local priest. This unique triple dating also fixes the date of the ascendancy of Malichus I at 63/62 B. C. The inscription records a dedication to Dushares, the chief Nabataean god, and locates his shrine at Daphne, modern Tell ed-Defenna, in the northeast Delta. The palaeography of the inscription is significant. This is the second oldest extant Nabataean inscription from Egypt.

An Inscription from the Temple of Bel in Palmyra Reconsidered

Reconsideration of the trilingual inscription from the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria, provides additional evidence of the stonemasons and sculptors employed there during the first and second centuries A. D. The inscription was placed on the top surface of the drum of the column, which was once situated in the southern peristyle of the temple cella. As published by Cantineau (1933) the Latin part was missing. The copy made during the 1981 Polish Archaeological Campaign shows other considerable differences. A new reading proposed here gives in its Greek part the name of Lucius Eras son of Zabu, which is repeated in the Latin part. The Palmyrene formula is well known and the names mentioned are generally attested in Palmyra.