Taro's Travels

Building Stories

JORDAN | Friday, 24 December 2010 | Views [647]

story (noun), from Latin historia:
   1.    A narrative concerning real or fictional events;
   2.    A level of a building (mainly US; see storey);
   3.    A lie.

In the Beginning

Once upon a time a question was asked. Perhaps it was “Why are we here?” or “How are the gods to be properly honoured?”. Or perhaps it was “Why does it rain?” or “How shall we stay dry?”. It could have been “What happens when I die?” or “How shall I be remembered when I am gone?”. Or maybe “Who is over there?” or “How can we protect ourselves?”. And an answer came to the questioner: “We were created”... “A temple”... ”Hubal sends it”... “A house”... “The afterlife”... “A mausoleum”... “Strangers”... “A fortress”...

Present and Past

Amman (when I visited it) was not a beautiful city, though it improved in the evening when less of it could be seen, and the lights came on. At best it was interesting ugly - a city of multi-story concrete buildings cascading over the steep hills and along the canyoned streets in the valleys between. Perhaps spring might prettify it, but at the moment it is a city of browns and greys. The buildings are generally brownish-white and brownish-grey and the ground is generally concrete and tile, or bare dirt - a desert city of desert colours. There are exceptions: the occasional building of reflective blue glass, some watered and maintained vegetation along the median strip of major roads, or a places where trees grow in bare earth, but the overall impression remains. It is, however, modern, clean (though at this time muddy), and non-touristy. Despite its modernity, there have been settlements here for at least ten thousand years, though few of the buildings are even half a century in age. Only a handful of its ancient structures remain standing in the Downtown area, and all are closely surrounded by the modern city.

Future?

Throughout Jordan you see what appears to be unfinished buildings. These are not buildings under construction - there are plenty of those too - but buildings with their lower story or stories occupied, and above that groves of bare rebar, perhaps springing from stubby concrete pillars, suggesting that one day another story might be completed. Other unfinished buildings abound with their upper story walled and roofed but devoid of fittings, finishings, furniture, windows, and doors, and showing no sign that things are likely to be completed anytime soon.

Fragments

Earthquakes tumbled the old places down; their stones lay upon their hills until archaeologists came to reconstruct what was. Rebuilding has only been partial however - what were covered colonnades at Jerash are an avenue of pillars now; few pillars in what were colonnades at Umm Qais still remain upright. Walls which were once covered in brightly-coloured stucco are now almost universally raw stone. Vaulted spaces might be navigable, giving a sense of what was once inhabited, but even Ajloun, the most completely restored of the castles seen, had parts of its battlements offlimits, and in Karak weathered stairs lead to impassable tunnels and reaching the highest battlements is an unsafe clamber even in dry weather. Enough is there of Shobak Castle to get an idea of the rough layout, but most of it is rubble. Even at Petra, where the carved cliff-faces are still largely intact, archaeologists have suggested that there used to be more there - pillared courts and covered buildings extending out from some of the cliffs.

The Tale of the Pharaoh.

Once upon a time, so the Jewish story goes, the Israelites led by the prophet Moses fled across the Reed Sea, and the army of the Egyptian pharaoh following them drowned as the waters returned. The story of the Israelites continues in Shemot (Exodus), but not the story of the pharaoh; the telling of that belongs instead to the Bedouin.

Pharaoh was a powerful magician, and so was not caught in the deluge. Instead he continued to pursue the fleeing Israelites. Finding that the wealth he carried slowed his pursuit, however, he used his magic and a building appeared in the cliff-face before him: stairs and pillars and rooms springing fully formed from the rock, and the facade of this building replete with carvings. At the apex of the facade he made an urn, and in this he hid his treasure and resumed his pursuit with increased speed. The place is Khaznet al-Faraoun, “The Treasury of the Pharaoh”, and in years past treasure-seekers have taken many shots at that urn, scarring a wide area around it with bullet holes, and dislodging stone but not gold. If for some reason you happened to distrust the tale, then you may choose to believe it was a tomb or a temple instead -- perhaps the temple in which Dr Henry Jones Jr, archaeology professor of Barnett College, Fairfield, New York, discovered the Holy Grail.

Once upon a time - later, but not much later - the Pharaoh found that the Israelites were still too quick for him. Only one thing was to be done: leave his daughter behind. Again he used his magic, and a magnificent building made from stone blocks sprang up in the valley there. Leaving his daughter (and perhaps servants and baggage) behind, he resumed his pursuit with increased speed. The place is Qasr al-Bint al-Faraoun, “the Place of the Pharaoh’s daughter”. If for some reason you happened to distrust this tale, however, then you may choose to believe it was a temple to Dushara, the mountain god of the Nabataeans, wherein he communed with his priests.

And not far from where the Pharaoh purportedly abandoned his daughter (was there a causal connection? Who can say) is a partially-intact stone column. This was traditionally known as Zibb al-faraoun, “The Pharoah’s Phallus”, and is so large and heavy that you might choose to be convinced of three things:

Pharaoh found the Israelites still too quick for him.
Pharaoh moved faster once he stopped lugging his zibb.
At one time, Pharaoh had used just a little too much magic on himself.

The Prototype of a Building

I don’t know if it is quite correct to call the cliff-structures at Petra “buildings”. You wouldn’t call a Bedouin tent a building, for instance. True, it has walls and a roof, but a tent has the suggestion of impermanence, even if the tent in question is permanently stationed on concrete. And the structures at Petra? Well, they have square-cut interior walls and square cut ceilings and flat floors, and are about as permanent a structure as one finds from ancient times. And yet... technically they’re manmade caves, with many such of these structures sharing the one mountainside and the rooms in all but one of them uncarved apart from niches in the walls or hollows in the floor for graves in the tombs. They’re definitely buildingesque; their facades make them look like buildings of one or more stories, with pillars and their capitals, a roofline, and so on, but such details are all purely decorative. Even the pillars of the Treasury are non-functional: one broke (and has now been replaced) but the remainder of the facade stayed exactly where it was. If the pillar had been real then the roof above it would have collapsed, as so many true roofs at other sites have when the true pillars beneath them have crumbled.

Calling the structures at Petra “caves” really doesn’t seem to do them proper justice, however. If their facades or interiors were less building-like it might be different. Is having sufficient resemblance to a building and function identical to something that is unquestionably a building sufficient to call them “buildings”? They’re not free-standing, but then neither is a specific terrace house. It’s true that their creation is subtractive rather than additive, as though the building were always there, and only waiting to be revealed by the carver, but is that enough to disqualify it? Qasr al-Bint was unquestionably a building - freestanding and stone-built - but with crumbling walls, what looks like a perilously balanced arch, and no roof, it really can’t function as a building, while so many of the other structures can and, in the case of those still being used by Petra’s remaining Bedouin, do.

Adaptation

The Treasury is magnificently carved -- its the finest of Petra’s buildings -- but for me ad-Deir, “the Monastery”, is my favourite. It’s a good hike up a mountain to get there, and its facade is not nearly as detailed as the Treasury’s is, but the scale of the thing is breathtaking. The facade of the place is nearly fifty metres high, a representation of two stories. Its doorway alone would be eight or ten metres high; it’s a doorway fit for a giant, or a god.

The Monastery is called that owing to the crosses carved on the walls, but its construction predates Christianity by several centuries - it would have been a temple originally. Petra (and for that matter [Trans]Jordan has had multiple periods of control - the Nabataeans and the pantheist Romans, and multiple strains of Christians and Muslims - and many of its ancient buildings have been repurposed multiple times. The Amphitheatre in Amman is still in use. In some cases the building may have been built and extended and maintained over a period of centuries by successive owners - a mixture of styles, integrated but not homogenous.

An Ending

From Wadi Musa, the town by Petra, I bussed down to Aqaba, Jordan’s only coastal city. It was another city of greys and browns, of partially finished buildings, of bare dirt patches, and steep surrounding mountains - though bare and dark brown, and not built upon. In the central city, however, we passed a small patch of green - a triangular park railed off with lush green grass, shady trees, and flower beds; a gardener with hose stood watering it. The bus continued on to its terminus. My fellow backpackers were staying the night in Aqaba before heading on to Israel and Cairo respectively. It was 11am. “I want to catch the ferry...”, I asked my driver. “You can’t today”, was his response.

Disappointed, I exited the bus and peered at my guidebook for Aqaba. “Ferry Terminus?” asked a nearby taxi driver. “I can catch it today?”. “Yes”. He drove me to the ticket office and then the port. I was on the 1pm boat bound for Egypt.