Recovering the past from above Hibabiya — an EarlyIslamic village in the Jordanian desert?

Almost immediately after Transjordan became a BritishMandate (1921), RAF pilots on the new airmail routeacross the north-eastern desert to Iraq were confrontedwith a huge array of archaeological sites beneath theireyes. Most were previously unknown and in the panhandlethey were largely unsuspected (Kennedy, in preparation,a). An aerial photograph of one of these was subsequentlypublished in an article by Gp/Capt L.W.B. Rees, thecommanding officer in Transjordan at the time (1929: 404and pl. 7). It bore the caption ‘The Fishing Village ofHabeiba’ and was located between the known Roman1 fortof Qasr al-Hallabat and the Azraq oasis. The name is nowofficially Hibabiya (32 3′5.86″N, 36 33′44.65″E) (Fig. 1).

Rees’s photograph shows a dark tongue of landsurrounded by the pale silt of one of a number of mudflats— Qa Hibabiya — in the region (see Fig. 2). Scatteredalong this high ground are some thirty rectilinear struc-tures and along the ‘shoreline’ is a succession of largerectilinear enclosures.

We have three closely contemporary, if brief, accountsof the place. All three visitors had a particular interest inprehistory and flints and made collections. The first is fromtwo years earlier when Rees had guided the Americanarchaeologist Henry Field to the site in November 1927(Field 1960: 46):

We continued to Habeiba, ...which is on the mud flat atthe north end of Qurun el-Jamus. The square, ruinedbuildings bordering on the mud flat and all above thewater level, would indicate a possible fishing village orat any rate a village along the mud flat which at thatformer time was covered or partially covered withwater.

Field was there again in March 1928 (1960: 147), thistime reporting flints ‘found near Habeiba’ rather than at it.

In November 1928 Rees returned, this time hostingCrawford who had just launched his new periodicalAntiquity and was on a three-week visit to Jordan.Crawford says only that, ‘We visited the remains of afishing village beside a dried-up lake’ (1955: 187). In hisown account the following year, Rees (1929: 404)explicitly says that ‘numerous flints are found round the

Britain and the Middle East were the two areas in which the technique of aerialarchaeology was pioneered in the 1920s. Overwhelmingly the latter took place inSyria where a French Jesuit priest, Antoine Poidebard, worked for a generation.Further south in Transjordan — as it then was — three men presided over a brief(1927–1929) but fruitful period: an archaeologist with a passion for the newlydeveloping technique (O.G.S. Crawford) and two pilots of the Royal Air Force withan amateur interest in what they saw beneath their wings (Flt. Lt. P.E. Maitland andGp/Capt L.W.B. Rees). An aerial photograph published at the time seemed to identifya ‘village’ as prehistoric. Over eighty years later and just after it was destroyed, a freshexamination and the rediscovery of some crucial dating evidence have combined toidentify it as, probably, an early Islamic village on the desert fringe.

Keywords: Jordan, Islamic, remote sensing, rural settlement, nomad

David KennedyUniversity of Western Australia,M205, 35 Stirling HWY,Crawley, Western Australia 6009

e-mail: david.kennedy@uwa.edu.au

1 British scholars commonly use ‘Roman’ for the entire period tothe arrival of Islam. To avoid too much confusion I have fre-quently added the North American ‘Byzantine’ for what I wouldcall Late Roman (c. fourth to early seventh centuries).

Arab. arch. epig. 2011: 22: 253–260 (2011)Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved

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houses’, although he identified one building as a ‘Romanguard-house’. Field — it should be noted — attributed atleast some of the flints he saw to the shore of the mudflatwhile others are just ‘found near Habeiba’ (1960: xiii, 46,115, 117–118, 145, 147). All three seem content to see theshoreline enclosures as fish-traps. Finally, Field gavecoordinates for a major feature said to be close to wherethe site is located, but these coordinates place it 20 km tothe east of reality (1960: 46, 208); Habeiba/Hibabiya itselfis not included in his list of sites for which he providescoordinates.

Almost half a century passed before two more archae-ologists — again prehistorians — visited the area. Garrardand Stanley-Price published very brief reports and in atable included a number of sites numbered around theshore of Qa Khanna (1975: 90; 1975–1977: 119). One ofthese they call ‘Qa Khanna IV (Habeiba)’. Qa Khanna is infact a different mudflat from Qa Hibabiya, which begins 5km to its east.2

In short, there are contradictions of location and date,and the nature of the ‘village’ and its houses is left insuspense but with the implication that all but one areassociated with the flints.

DatingThe sparse dating evidence in these reports all points tovery early prehistoric periods. Flints — at least some of

which certainly came from Hibabiya— are Epipalaeolithicto Late Neolithic (Rollefson, personal communication, 16/11/2010). Moreover, this is certainly an area rich inprehistoric structures: at least forty-nine Kites (pre-historicanimal traps) and much else within a 10 km radius (Fig. 3).

There is a solution — Crawford in fact returned to thesubject of ‘Habeiba’ although it is brief and hidden in oneof his ‘Notes and News’ items in Antiquity. In a sub-section headed ‘Potsherds from the Transjordan Desert’(1931: 363) he wrote:

During a recent visit to the Middle East we visited twoancient sites lying in the desert east of Amman... Onboth sites we found ancient potsherds. There is a stronga priori probability that, at any rate at Habeiba, thepottery is contemporary with the remains of wallsvisible; it is at any rate the only discovery that has beenmade there, and therefore the only clue, if such it is, tothe age of the ruins. We therefore submitted thepotsherds to Miss Agnes Conway and Mr G. Horsfield,whose knowledge of kindred wares in that region isgreat; and we print below Mr Horsfield’s report. Thesherds are all now in the Archaeological Museum atCambridge.

This is the first and only indicator that the earlier visitorshad encountered pottery as well as flints.

In summary, the report Crawford then published datesof the several batches of pottery to — variously — theEarly Iron Age, Hellenistic and Roman periods. In the1930s and for long afterwards, however, the ceramics ofJordan were poorly known and dated. However, thedescriptions given by Crawford, at least for the first group,were adequate to suggest to this author a much later date— in the Umayyad and/or Abbasid period. Happily thesherds are preserved in the Museum of Archaeology andAnthropology at Cambridge — five batches totallingninety sherds. Photographs have been examined by InaKehrberg of the University of Sydney who provided thereport below (see Appendix).3

The results seem quite convincing: there is nothingRoman or earlier. The ceramics are overwhelmingly LateByzantine–Umayyad or Umayyad with two small batches(MAA 1930.91 and 92) identified as Early Abbasidcooking ware. Collectively the sherds indicate the site was

Fig. 1.A map of Hibabiya and its context (drawing by Stafford Smith).

2 Qa Khanna was made notorious in September 1970 when thePopular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four air-liners to the old RAF airstrip on the mudflat there known asDawson’s Field.

3 I am grateful to Anne Taylor and Imogen Gunn of the Museumof Archaeology and Anthropology for facilitating the taking ofphotographs.

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Fig. 3.A map of the Kites within a 10 km radius of Hibabiya (drawing by Stafford Smith after Google Earth).

Fig. 2.An aerial view of Hibabiya in 1953 (APAAME_19530411_ HAS-55-75).

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in use in the period c. late sixth/early seventh to mid-/lateeighth century AD. This is a major advance and supportsan interpretation implied by the character of the individualhouses, and what may be inferred about the nature of this

village from closer inspection of the aerial photos of 1929and others of 1953 in my archive.

The ‘village’A closer inspection of Rees’s photograph (which has noscale) and some taken more recently in 1953 (where anapproximate scale can be calculated) (see Fig. 2) isinstructive. There are at least thirty individual ‘houses’varying in form from an agglomeration of two to six (?)rooms to several that are of the courtyard type — arectilinear structure with internal rooms along one or morewalls (Fig. 4). A few of the latter are very large — thebiggest (1 on Fig. 4) is about 40 × 50 m2 and severalothers may be in the 25–30 m2 range.

A Roman period village of Arabia would have a denseconcentration of houses (see e.g. Kennedy & Bewley2004: figs 9/7, 11/3–6, 11/9–10); in contrast, the buildingshere are scattered for about 750 m along the tongue of highground. In fact, the buildings and the pattern are familiarfrom another period. A glance at the Umayyad ‘nomadtown’ at Ar-Risha north of Ruwaishid far out in theJordanian panhandle (Helms 1990: 72, fig. 22), the LateRoman/Byzantine to Abbasid settlement at Humayma inthe Hisma desert in the far south of Jordan (Fig. 5) and theLate Roman/Byzantine and Abbasid settlement at Qasr al-Hallabat (Figs 6 and 7) show the type in better-known anddated contexts (Kennedy 1982: 60, 61, fig. 10; Ghrayib

Fig. 4.A sketch map of the ‘village’ at Hibabiya from the aerial imagery(drawing by Stafford Smith).

Fig. 5.Humayma — ancient houses and fields (APAAME_19980520_RHB-0080).

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2003; Ghrayib & Ronza 2007). In each case the houses areof a Roman/Late Byzantine rural type common in the NearEast (see Hirschfeld 1995; 1997: ch. 1; 1998). The qualityof construction often seems poor. At Ar-Risha, Helms(1990: ch. 4) described many buildings as a stonefoundation of (at best) crudely shaped blocks and manywalls of mud brick or pisé. At Hallabat the buildings arebetter built but still scattered almost randomly, not unlikemany modern Bedouin villages. A brief visit at Khirbetal-Askar, a newly identified site south-east of Kerak andof the same period, revealed poor-quality foundationsand probably pisé/mud-brick walls (Kennedy, in prepara-tion, b).

Ar-Risha is one of the best known of these ‘nomadtowns’ — settlements seemingly reflecting the transitionperiod in the Late Roman/Byzantine–Islamic Near Eastwhen nomadic supporters of the Roman/Byzantine stateand later the new Muslim rulers, were settled in marginalareas. The sites offer a fascinating image of this phase(Helms 1990; Whitcomb 2006; 2009).

Returning to Hibabiya, the so-called ‘fish-traps’ (Rees1929: 404)4 — the enclosures along the ‘shore’ of thismudflat — are more plausibly explained as ‘gardens’exploiting the annual flooding. There is a walled Umayyadgarden c.20 km westwards at Umayyad Hallabat betweentwo wadis (Fig. 7) and smaller enclosed areas each suppliedwith water through a sophisticated system of drop-gates

(Bisheh 1982a; 1982b: 138–143). At Humayma the fieldsare still visible across the wadi spread (Fig. 5).

We may note two further features of Hibabiya. First, itlies on one of a string of mudflats between the Azraq oasisand Qasr el-Hallabat and as such, was probably amigration route for nomads (see Kennedy 1997: 90)(Fig. 8). Qa el-Hibabiya is in fact by far the largest of thesemudflats, c.11 x c.3 km. Second, all of these mudflats havesome potential for farming where water collects in deeperparts or where pits are dug. Some — like Qa Hibabiya —are better favoured than others in this respect. Two wadifans open out into it from the north, creating a spread ofricher soils often marked by extensive vegetation evenbefore the current farming began. One of these lies justnorth of where this tongue of land rises above the mudflat,and on the aerial imagery a deep channel rounding the eastend of the tongue is clearly visible (Fig. 2). In the lasttwenty years the area has been cleared, water harvestedand stored and an immense area planted with olive trees(Fig. 9). Plainly the ancient village was located on a routeand at a place where tribes and animals could be watered,find grazing and practise at least opportunistic farming.For that very reason there may well have been — as Fieldsuggested (1960: 46) — a Roman post of some kind there.

Fig. 6.Qasr al-Hallabat — an aerial view of part of the Umayyad village(APAAME_20090928_DLK-0009).

Fig. 7.Qasr al-Hallabat — a sketch plan of the village (Kennedy 1982: 61, fig.19; cf. Ghrayib 2003: 66, fig. 1; Ghrayib & Ronza 2007: 424, fig. 1).

4 See Field 1960: 139 who went as far as to suggest that someKites along the shores of mudflats like that at Habeiba/Hibabiya,were fish-traps of the kind seen under the sea off the north-westcoast of Bahrain.

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Later, in the generations of transition from Late Roman/Byzantine to Islamic rule, it would seem that a morepermanent settlement developed.

The development of the area has been disastrous for thearchaeological remains. From the air the distinctive outlineof the tongue of land can still be identified but the surface

Fig. 8.Probable route between the Azraq oasis and Qasr al-Hallabat following a line of mudflats (after Kennedy 1997: 90, fig. 11).

Fig. 9.Hibabiya — irrigated plantations (bottom), clearance (centre) andquarrying (top) (APAAME_20080925_DDB-0020).

Fig. 10.Sherds collected by Crawford and Rees at Hibabiya in 1929 (photographcourtesy of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology [CUMAA1930.94_RHB APAAME-1187]).

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has been wiped clear of almost all the structures — onlythe mutilated remains of a single building survive and allthe traces of the ‘fish-traps’/gardens are gone. Indeed,much of the northern half of the tongue has been removedin an immense quarrying operation (Fig. 9). In short, theopportunity to study the remains of this ‘village’ has beenirrevocably lost, except through the medium of aerialphotographs.

This is not, of course, simply yet another archaeologicalsite lost to development. Hibabiya emerges here as aprobable example of a site type from the crucial transitionperiod from Late Rome to Islam. The number of such sitesis growing but still modest in total, and few have beeninvestigated in any detail. Islamic archaeology in generalis a poor cousin to prehistoric or Roman archaeology inthe Middle East (Johns 2010). The transition phase fromLate Roman to Islamic is especially difficult partly becausemuch of the evidence lies in marginal areas that havetended to be neglected by scholars and partly because thequality of the structures was often poor. Nevertheless,there is a new impetus in Islamic archaeology (seeMilwright 2010: chs. 1 and 2) and the discovery of newsites such as Hibabiya and Khirbet al-Askar (Kennedy, in

preparation, b) and better data about existing ones, mayprovide an opportunity for a re-evaluation of this period.

Appendix — Report on the ceramics collected byCrawford in 1928Ina KehrbergThe ‘reading’ was carried out in Sydney solely on thebasis of photographs taken in Cambridge by Dr RobertBewley. The number of sherds is given in brackets.

CUMAA 1930.91 (4): Early Abbasid rather thanUmayyad, but it could be transitional eighth–ninth centuryAD.

CUMAA 1930.92 (14): Early Abbasid or possibly lateUmayyad.

CUMAA 1930.93 (29): Mix of Late Byzantine sixth–seventh century and Umayyad sherds; nothing looksAbbasid. Often storage jar fragments. Many showingsigns of having been ‘tooled’ or at any rate recycled.

CUMAA 1930.94 (41): A possible Late Roman handleand one Abbasid sherd. Otherwise Late Byzantine, LateByzantine/Umayyad and Umayyad. Several are ‘tooled’(Fig. 10).

CUMAA 1930.95 (2): Umayyad.Almost all of these sherds are a variety of jars. Nos. 91

and 92 seem from the same storage jar; no. 94 showshandles typical of the ‘cooking pot’ variety — one isUmayyad and the other could be Byzantine. There aresome handmade sherds typical for the Late Byzantine/Umayyad period: larger basin-type vessels and one or twoshallow dishes, all quite characteristic of kitchenware; thenarrow neck in 93 is again of a very common largishstorage jar, usually ribbed and for liquid. There has beensome reuse of sherds as ‘tools’, which could be contem-porary use or by later squatters using residual scatter.

AbbreviationsAPAAME Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology

in the Middle EastCUMAA Cambridge University Museum of Archaeol-

ogy and Anthropology.

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