We Survived the First Week

Our daily routine is up at 5.30am, a little earlier if the call to prayer at about 5am wakes us up. Breakfast at 6am and on the bus at 7pm sharp. 30 minutes drive from the hotel at Tall el-Hamman. Collect the tools from the Mosque, load them into the ute, and then walk up to our dig site arriving just as the ute passes by to drop off our stuff. Helen is now going straight to the pottery wash and sorting hut which is more like a rickety timber frame with some banana leaves for a roof. We start digging about 7.50am and go through to 3pm by which time it is getting too hot. We stop for lunch at 12pm for 30 minutes and have swarma which is a cooked chicken wrap kingd of thing or a fried chick pea roll up which I can't spell, even "swarma" is a bit dodgy spelling wise. This is washed down with Sodom wine, aka, Fanta. You have no idea how good Fanta tastes! We stop for regular water breaks and on average we are drinking 2 litres on the field, and as much again when we get back. At 3pm we pack up, on the bus by 3.30pm, back at the hotel 40-45 minutes latter. It a long climg for the bus back up tp Amman. Then it dinner at 6pm, amybe a lecture at 7pm like last night, then its to bed.

Talking of water, our hotel which is in one of the flasher suburbs of Amman, is not on town water. In fact I don't think anyone is. On Wednesday morning as we were getting on the bus a big water tanker arrived to fill the hotels roof tanks. They are rationed and the tanked water has to last the hotel for a week, so if we the guests use too much we miss out on a shower the last day or so. You can't drink the tap water so everything we drink is brought. Nestle water at the equivalent of 66 cents NZ a litre is the best.

Today we stopped work at 12pm and went on a 3 hour walking tour of the whole site and looked at where others are digging. Just up from us on the Upper Tall a group is digging a 6x6m shaft down to about 8m deep near the Palace. They got to 6m last year and on the last day of the dig in the ash layer found large chared wooden beams set into the mud brick walls. That's where they are heading again. On the lower Tall a group is working on the gate area and the residential houses around it. Here you can see the foundation of the city wall clearly, huge rocks in 3-5 courses high and 5-8m wide. The walls were made of mud brick but these have "tumbled" and because they were sun fried and not kiln fired, have dissolved into a thick layer of dusty soil. The walls they reckon would have been about 20m high and encircled the city at a distance of 2.7km, or 60-65 million bricks, enclosing 62 acres.

In the picture Helen is standing in the main gate to the city on the surface that was being used on destruction day, in other words the surface Lot walked on. The photo doesn't do it justice at all though. The walk way goes back and heads straight for the temple area. Running off this entrance way is a lane about 2m wide that runs along the inside of the wall. About every 15m similar lanes take off at right angles disappearing into the city area, and in between are the foundations and floors of houses. They have only dug about four of these so far. In other photos I have taken you can see the burning that took place with the blackend rock, the deep layer of ash in which they found the skeletal remains of four people killed in the destruction - in fact it leaves little for imagination. Scattered about are mud bricks as hard as rock that have been cooked by tremendous heat, more indications of the destruction event.

To the left and right of where I am taking the photo are the clear foundation stones of the gate towers. Behind Helen there is a 20x20m area that has a number of column bases that would have supported a portico type roof. Somewhere there, in the biblical story of Lot, he met the angels and took them home. We then followed the line of the wall around. In one part a Roman bath house 20mx35m is buit on top of the wall foundations and has been partly excavated. You can see the pools that used to run from hot to cold. There is a hot spring about 200m away, infact there are 3 hot springs, plus a number of cold fresh water springs in or near the city. This complex was a favourite place for Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, who had John the Baptists head chopped off. Carrying around the wall we walked to the most western part of the Tall marked by a tower and looked back 1 km to the upper Tall that looks so imposing in context. Carrying on we came to another lower Tall dig where the group last year excavated an iron age house. This week they have removed those foundations and floors and are going down into the Middle Branze age building underneath from Abraham and Lot's time. They think this house being close to the temple area had something to do with it, like a priests house. Sodom is layers upon layer of building built one on top of another over hundreds of years. What is interesting is that residential buildings always follow the same footprint over that time. It has been discovered that the city was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times, but the destruction layer connected to the story of Lot is significantly obvious. However, it appears that there have also been a number of earthquake destructions. People knocked the houses down and started again, as I said on the same foot print as before. However, the cultic buildings like the temple were slightly realigned on at least two occassions as they were being rebuilt. The explanation is that those buildings were laid out strictly by astronimical alignments using Sun and stars. The theory is that the major earthquakes affected the tilt of the earth on its axis changing the alignment by a degree or so, exactly like the Japan earthquake did a couple of years ago. So in laying out the new buildings, the foot print changed slighly. You can actually see it. Hows that for a theory?

We are both glad of a couple of days off. It has been a hard week physically and we are pretty tired. Tomorrow we are off on a tour of Mt Nebo and the land of Moab, the area of the Tribe of Gad after the Jewish conquest of Cannan, and Perea in NT times. On Saturday we were supposed to be going to Petra but there has been a late change of plan and thats on next weekend. Tonight I phoned a Nz'er, the daughter of a ministry colleague in Southland who lives in Amman. We brought presents for the grand kids with us. We will be having dinner with them sometime this week, maybe next. We learnt today not to call the Jordanian helpers on the dig "dude" - it means "worm" in Arabic.