A Border Whose Roots Grow Deep

Courtesy of the Jabal Hamrat Fidan Project

Dr. Russell B. Adams, left, and Dr. Thomas E. Levy at Khirbat Hamra Ifdan, where excavators uncovered an ax casting mold and a copper ax.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
he Wadi Arabah was no barrier to Lawrence of Arabia. From the village of Buseira, he and four companions rode camels down the zigzags of a steep pass through bare rock of many colors, down into the heat at the bottom of the abyss. Above, he wrote, "the cliffs and hills so drew together that hardly did the stars shine into its pitchy blackness."

Soon the travelers emerged from the narrow valley in the east and crossed miles of the open Wadi Arabah, a desolate and below-sea-level rent in the earth's surface running from the Dead Sea south to the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a section of the Great Rift Valley, which extends from southern Turkey through much of Africa.

The 110-mile-long wadi today is the tightly controlled boundary between the Negev of Israel and southern Jordan. The sparsely populated and largely undeveloped region is an object of increasing fascination among scholars who pursue what could be called the archaeology of borderlands.

To the concern of archaeologists, Israel and Jordan are casting covetous eyes on the region for a pipeline or canal to replenish the declining Dead Sea with water from the Red Sea. Unesco is considering designation of the entire Rift Valley as a World Heritage site, an action that could encourage more research in places like the Wadi Arabah.

In "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," T. E. Lawrence described in his evocative style the depths of Arabah as "a strange place, sterile with salt, like a rough sea suddenly stilled, with all its tossing waves transformed into hard, fibrous earth, very grey under to-night's half-moon."

After an arduous journey 5,000 feet down, 3,000 feet up, the travelers finally climbed out of the valley at daybreak and proceeded across a plain in Palestine to Beersheba. They covered 80 miles to join British forces. It was February 1918, in the waning months of World War I and the Allied campaign against Turkey, another time of turmoil in the Mideast.

Lawrence's adventure, crossing one of nature's more formidable obstacles to human interaction, was no mean feat, but not unheard of. History and archaeology show that for centuries, from the Stone Age through biblical times and successive empires, crossings were possible and, sometimes, regular occurrences. People traversed Arabah for trade and plunder, refuge and revenge, love and reunion.

"What we've all regarded as a border between warring nations for hundreds, if not thousands, of years was no border or barrier at all in terms of trade, resources and water," Dr. Piotr Bienkowski, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester in England, said. "Only in the last couple of generations has it become a modern fixed boundary. Only in that time have archaeologists been conditioned to think of it as a barrier."

Archaeologists may study the past, but they live in the present. For the last half-century, the boundary along Arabah has been fenced and guarded, sometimes with land mines, especially from 1948 to 1994, when Israel and Jordan were at war.

But a closer examination of historical texts and new excavations have changed minds. At a symposium last month in Atlanta, scholars acknowledged that the rugged valley, though clearly an impediment, was much less of a social and economic divide than they had thought.

The symposium, "Crossing the Rift: Resources, Routes, Settlement Patterns and Interactions in the Wadi Arabah," was seen as a modest and cautious step in an effort to expand archaeological investigation of the Arabah region and encourage more cooperation and coordination between researchers working on each side of the Israeli-Jordanian border. No one pretended that the prospects for immediate success were bright, given the volatility of Middle East politics.

The meeting was organized by Dr. Bienkowski, who excavates in Jordan, and Dr. Katharina Galor of Brown, who specializes in the archaeology of Israel. It was held with the annual conference of the American Schools of Oriental Research, an organization of scholars of Mideastern antiquity.

In the spirit of measured hopefulness, Dr. Galor opened the symposium with the greetings, "Shalom," meaning "peace" in Hebrew, and, "Ahlan wa sahlan," which in a literal translation from Arabic means, "you came to a relative of yours and you came to a place that is a wadi."

Dr. Ramadan Hussein, an Arabic instructor at Brown, explained to her that a wadi, often the site of an oasis, is meant here as a symbol of prosperity, which the greeter is offering to share with the guest.

Afterward, Dr. Galor conceded that the symposium reflected the uncertain prospects for increased collaboration in Arabah research. The meeting was originally to have been in Jerusalem, with a large delegation of Jordanian archaeologists attending. Heightened tensions forced the shift to Atlanta. One Jordanian showed up. "A completely unified enterprise does not appear realistic at this point," Dr. Galor said.

The situation reminded Dr. Thomas E. Levy, an archaeologist at the University of California at San Diego, of an Arabic expression, "Yom asal, yom basal," one day honey, one day onions. "The conference offered us one day of honey, and hopefully there will be many more in the near future," Dr. Levy said.

At least it was a start. Until recently, Israeli and Jordanian researchers could not attend each other's meetings and rarely shared information. Most of the researchers could sympathize with Dr. Bienkowski. "I work in Jordan and cannot explain Jordan material without looking at the whole area to explain what was happening long ago in Wadi Arabah," he said. "That has been virtually impossible."

The absence of a map of all the known excavation sites on both sides of the wadi had been a handicap, remedied in time for the meeting. A compendium of 6,000 excavation sites was compiled by computer scientists at Brown, mainly from Israeli sources.

In their papers and in interviews, the scholars elaborated on evidence that the Wadi Arabah has been traversed by people through nearly all history, Egyptians and Jews and Arabs, Edomites and Nabateans, Romans and Byzantines, incense caravans and nomadic Bedouin tribes.

Excavations at the southeastern end of the Dead Sea have found traces of roads, travelers' waste and stone remnants of way-stations of ancient trade routes leading across Arabah into the Negev Desert of present-day Israel. Dr. Yuval Yekutieli of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev said the trade routes appeared to be from the Early Bronze Age, as much as 5,000 years ago.

Archives document that Egyptians had contacts as early as the 13th century B.C. with a place named Edom, in what is now southern Jordan. It may be no coincidence that this appeared to be when camels were domesticated and new trade routes opened in the region.

Recent excavations by Dr. Levy and archaeologists of the Department of Antiquities in Jordan found that copper production was an important source of Edom's growth and east-west overland trade. Ancient Edom also had a major seaport near Aqaba for trade along the Red Sea.

Edom is mentioned several times in the Bible as an enemy of the Israelites. Scholars now think Edom was not a centralized state, but more of a confederation of tribes. In any case, the Edomites did not stay put on their side of the wadi. Their god, Kos, was sometimes worshiped west of the wadi, indicating that some Edomite tribes had settled there.

By the late fourth century B.C., people known as the Nabateans were living east of Arabah. Merchants in the incense and spice trade, the Nabateans plied their commerce on routes crossing Arabah to Gaza and others taking them to Damascus. A beautiful relic of Nabatean incense wealth is the first century B.C. architecture of Petra, their seat east of Arabah. Nabatean influence was wide. Their pottery and other artifacts have been found at many sites in Israel. A Jewish king, son of Herod the Great, married a daughter of the Nabatean king, perhaps to cement economic ties across the border.

Dr. Clinton Bailey, a scholar at Hebrew University, has lived with Bedouin tribes in the region and translated their poetry. His research, he said, shows that Arabah has at times been a barrier and an interface. Tribes of the nomadic pastoralists worked both sides of the wadi. But for a long time, Dr. Bailey noted, people west of the wadi "saw danger coming from the east, saw the Arabah as a route of conquest and raids."

Among the most significant finds are copper mines and processing factories. Some have been uncovered on the western side, notably at Timna. The most extensive remains of a copper industry are along the eastern edge, in Jordan. Thirty miles south of the Dead Sea, in its Faynan area, a team led by Dr. Levy excavated a 5,000-year-old copper-processing center that experts said was one of the largest copper sources in the eastern Mediterranean then. In the rubble at Khirbat Hamra Ifdan, excavators uncovered stone hammers, anvils and crucibles, as well as molds for copper axes and chisels.

Another discovery by Dr. Levy's group — including Dr. Russell B. Adams of McMaster University in Ontario, Dr. Andreas Hauptmann of the German Mining Museum and Dr. Mohammad Najjar of Jordan — is a copper factory from the biblical era.

The site at Khirbat en-Nahas, east of the wadi, and evidence of trade routes leading from it, Dr. Levy said, showed "conclusively that the Wadi Arabah was never a barrier to social and cultural interaction." An analysis of the distinctive "fingerprints" in the metal showed that copper from east of the wadi was traded widely in Egypt and Israel.

Even with the discoveries, Dr. Adams cautioned that many problems remained in "understanding the wadi in its entirety and in terms of human interactions across it."

But like Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Levy has demonstrated again that the Wadi Arabah is no uncrossable barrier. In 1997, he led a group of Jordanian, Israeli, American and German researchers on a trek across the wadi, following an ancient trade route from the copper center at Faynan to an exit leading to Beersheba, in Israel.

The expedition used two modes of transportation, donkeys and the trekkers' own feet. The donkeys carried saddlebags loaded with copper to re-enact ancient treks. The journey across took only six hours. It was enough, Dr. Levy said, for researchers from different and sometimes hostile countries to develop collegial ties.

Describing the trek at the symposium, Dr. Levy said: "If anything, the relatively short distances in the Arabah and the relative abundance of springs within a day's walk of each other ensured that trade, exchange and social interaction was always possible whether conducted by foot, donkey or camel. The chief impediment would have been social relations between the people living in the region — just like today."