Nothing but desert sand and one big mass of black stone chunks, as far as the eye can see. The elongated and flattened hills in the landscape of Jebel Qurma are also black with basalt. The photo op the website of the research project of Peter Akkermans, professor of Near Eastern archeology at Leiden University, immediately raises questions. What is an archaeologist doing here? Did people really live in this merciless landscape in northeastern Jordan?
“People have moved through the area and lived here since the early Stone Age,” Akkermans answers in his Leiden office. They left behind countless traces, including flint tools, petroglyphs, inscriptions, bronze arrowheads, jewelry, pottery and stone fences, which were used, among other things, to hunt animals. On a bookcase shelf in Akkermans’ office are a sandal and three broken shoes: traces of modern nomadic life in the desert.
“We record everything, including these shoes. Strange, but we only find loose shoes, even a black women’s boot with a platform sole and high heel,” says Akkermans, who is now concentrating on researching the many tombs in the landscape. “Until now, based on aerial and satellite photographs and without further archaeological investigation on site, it was assumed that they are prehistoric and at least five thousand years old. I personally conclude on the basis of archaeological data that they are much younger, because from the period 1000 BC and 300 AD.”
The Leiden archaeologist is known for the long-term excavation of Tell Sabi Abyad, an (Assyrian) settlement in Syria that had been inhabited for centuries. The Syrian Civil War and IS’s destruction and looting of the excavation warehouse put an end to 25 years of scientific work. “But then I had been thinking about excavating something completely different for a few years,” says Akkermans. So when most of his colleagues who had dug in Syria emigrated to Kurdistan in Iraq, he sought refuge in the southwest in 2012, where the Black Desert begins below Damascus. The basalt desert extends via Jordan to Saudi Arabia. The basalt, which is actually solidified lava, is a reminder that the area is volcanic.
Fifty days of dust
For a long time it has hardly been studied. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Czech explorer Alois Musil traveled through the basalt desert. And in 1927, flight lieutenant Percy Maitland, who regularly flew over the Jordanian desert between Haifa and Baghdad, wrote an article in Antiquity about stone structures he had seen from the air. Akkermans cites the work of the Scottish archaeologist Alison Betts as his main source of inspiration. “She toured the area in a van in the 1970s and 1980s and conducted the first serious archaeological research.”
According to Akkermans, there were two reasons for the limited interest of archaeologists in the Black Desert. “The conditions are harsh: in the summer it is above forty degrees, in the winter it is freezing, and from March to April you have ‘the fifty days of dust’, a period with sandstorms. Finally, it is very dry, less than 50 millimeters of water falls per year. The area is so inhospitable that it was assumed that few archaeological traces would be found.”
Safaitic petroglyphs
Akkermans has now completed eleven years of research, more than a hundred kilometers east of the Jordanian capital Amman. He now knows from his own experience that conditions can be tough at different times of the year. Heat, cold and sandstorms, he and his team have experienced it all. He also sees it in the eucalyptus trees dying due to a lack of water around their permanent home in the desert. “We are in a former oil camp from the 1970s. Every year we have to clear a mountain of sand and we see the cabins breaking down and collapsing more and more.”
On the other hand, he and his team, which consists of seven to fifteen people depending on the research to be carried out, have gotten to know the landscape better and better. “We now know where traditionally used roads and paths run between the basalt stones. We also find petroglyphs and inscriptions on those routes. It is also striking that the Bedouins today pitch their tents in places that previous nomads also used, as evidenced by pieces of pottery: such a place is often near a wadi [een droge rivierbedding]is relatively sheltered and has already been cleaned and cleared of stones.”
As far as theses are concerned, the counter is at three, says Akkermans. The first from 2018, by Harmen Huigens, provided a first picture of nomadic life in the first millennium before and after Christ, based on field explorations, satellite photos and small excavations. It was noticeable that the nomads were involved in landscaping. For example, they placed their graves in clearly visible places on the hills. The mobile groups were also in contact with the sedentary world on the edge of the desert. This is evident, among other things, from the origin of jewelry. “At Azraq, where we do our shopping thirty kilometers west of our research site, there was a camp in Roman times. Qasr Azraq is a medieval castle of the Mamluks and Lawrence of Arabia still had his headquarters there.”
Charcoal residues
In the second dissertation, for which Nathalie Brusgaard received her doctorate a year later, 4,500 Safaitic petroglyphs in the area were examined for the first time. The Safaites were nomadic Arabs who lived in the Black Desert in the first millennium BC and until the third century AD.
The images of dromedaries, horses, sheep, goats, hunting wild animals and battling enemies showed what nomadic life was all about. Many drawings were placed at high vantage points, from where the nomads could keep an eye on the cattle, discover game and see enemies approaching. The rock art also assured them of a tangible memory of their life in the desert landscape for generations.
“Many of the animals depicted, such as ostriches, lions and gazelles, no longer exist,” says Akkermans. Together with charcoal remains of plane, fig and ash, trees that require relatively much water, they suggest that it was less dry in the past. “Desertification probably occurred later.”
In Chiara della Puppa’s third dissertation, published last year, more than six thousand Safaitic inscriptions were recorded. “Often it’s just about names. Or simple messages like ‘I was waiting for the rain’ or ‘I came across my father’s grave’.”
Neatly stacked cairns
Such a grave was constructed from basalt stones and usually round, with a diameter of four to ten meters. In the center was a tholos-like burial chamber, round and with a domed roof. “There were still gaps between the stacked stones,” says Akkermans. “We therefore found mouse bones and snake remains in the graves. And always a thick layer of beetle remains at the bottom. Bones in most graves are poorly preserved.” However, they were able to determine that the victims were men, women and children and that the dead had been placed on their sides in their graves. “In one grave lay a woman with a child in her arms.”
The biggest problem with the graves was the precise dating, says Akermans. “We did find iron and bronze arrowheads and glass jewelry that pointed to contacts outside the desert, but no pottery. This meant there was no comparable material for dating.” The few bones that were there usually contained too little collagen, a protein, to do a C14 dating. “We therefore had C14 dating of bioapatite, the inorganic component of bones and teeth. This fairly recent dating method is extra sensitive to contamination, but the dating did agree with our C14 dating of collagen: the first centuries before, the first centuries after Christ.”
Many graves have a stone tail attached to them, as it were, Akkermans discovered. “It is a row of neatly stacked cairns. Sometimes it is a few meters long and sometimes tens of meters. At first we thought that each pile also contained a grave, but after we removed all the stones it turned out that there was nothing underneath.” After lengthy research using Google Earth, he was able to determine that the phenomenon extends from the Levant to Mesopotamia and Saudi Arabia.
Further research is needed to determine the precise meaning of the tails, says Akkermans. But the investigation is complicated by grave robbers. “Last January we had almost completely dug up and marked a grave at the end of one day. When we came back the next day there was a deep hole and everything was disturbed.”
The same could have happened during the last campaign this summer, he thinks. “At the end of the working day I saw a car in the distance. When the team left, I stayed behind. After a while the car stopped at the bottom of our excavation site and the occupants came up. They were shocked when they saw me.”
He has explained countless times to nomads in the area that there is nothing of value in the graves. “They don’t believe us and are sure there must be gold. Because why else would we dig? According to them, the petroglyphs provide clues: images of scorpions contain Roman gold, a Star of David must contain Jewish gold and a crescent moon contains buried gold from the time of the Ottomans. Even our guard knows for sure: seven chests of gold are buried in Jebel Qurma.”