Desert castle restorations unearth clues to missing historical link

Jordan Times ^ | Friday, June 26th, 2009 | Taylor Luck

[SunkenCiv]

Qasr Al Hallabat, one of the Kingdom's so-called desert castles, a series of fortresses built by the Romans around the 2nd century to cement their presence in the Levant, is much more than the average castle, according to archaeologist and Spanish aid specialist Ignacio Arce. Arce, who has been working at the site since 2002, said the castle provides a missing link between the end of the Roman Empire's influence in the region and the Umayyad civilisation, a 100-year gap that has previously been left unaddressed... Arce was puzzled when he found evidence of restoration work on the mosaics within the Umayyad period, to which historians attribute the renovation of the palace and the laying down of new floors. "I kept asking myself: 'Why would the Umayyads restore their own mosaics?' And then it hit me, because it wasn't theirs in the first place," Arce said. As his team's restorations went further, it became clearer that the Roman fortress was expanded into a much larger structure before the arrival of the Umayyads. Revealing a palatial structure with limited military use in addition to a portico and a second storey, they discovered that the fortress was built beyond its previously believed dimensions... The Ghassanids, a group of monotheistic tribes originating from Yemen that played a prominent role in the region, had become de facto rulers of the region and established an Arab identity in the Eastern Badia and the Levant, Arce said.

[SunkenCiv]

Qasr Al Hallabat, the doorway to the desert, serves as a link between the end of the Roman Empire's influence in the region and the rise of the Umayyad civilisation (Photo by Taylor Luck)

[SunkenCiv]

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[parsifal]

Don’t you know the romans couldn’t wait to get out of there. Hot miserable dry place.

parsy, who figures all arab women must be hot.

[SunkenCiv]

And yet, the Romans stayed there for seven centuries. :’)

Under all that cloth? Yeah, they’re hot, but in temperature only.

[ckilmer]

maybe it was you who did the post on the roman trade with India. they crossed the desert from suez to greet the boats from india and bring back spices to rome.

[SunkenCiv]

re Roman Trade with India: Tamil Trade

The Roman (-era) trade vessels are referred to as the ships of the Vamanas (westerners) in old Tamil poetry; also, the Romans recruited and moved at least one workforce from India to a factory town on the Red Sea, probably to save costs and shipping miles (and/or avoid piracy or other problems).

The great scholar Lionel Casson has written that larger Roman ships displaced about 100 tons, but that's simply impossibly low, because those obelisks one can see in modern Rome were moved there by the Roman emperors from Egypt, and many of them far exceed 100 tons. Caligula's pleasure barge (destroyed in WWII bombing, alas) displaced about 300 tons, and the largest of the obelisks in Rome possibly exceeds that weight.. Caligula had columns quarried in Egypt for his temple (which was possibly finished during his reign, otherwise shortly thereafter, and since that time most of it has been dismantled), and each of them ran about 200 tons.

Just to satisfy the needs of the "games", the Romans imported Indian elephants (which are somewhat smaller than African elephants), a large African bear (which was apparently hunted to extinction by these efforts), and loads of other things. The Roman aristocracy loved exotic critters and unique foreign goods.

Those About To Die
Chapter XII
by Daniel P. Mannix

There were also man-sized apes called tityrus with round faces, reddish color and whiskers. Pictures of them appear on vases and they were apparently orangutans, imported from Indonesia. As far as I know, the Romans never exhibited gorillas although these biggest of all apes were known to the Phoenicians, who gave them their present name which means "hairy savage."

The surviving ancient text, Periplus of Hanno, describes a voyage down the western coast of Africa by Carthaginians (who were Phoenician in origin, language, and ethnicity); it describes Mount Cameroun in eruption, and the gorilla; a couple of gorilla skins were tacked up on the wall of the Carthaginian temple where a Greek traveler encountered the text and preserved a Greek translation. Anyway, when the gorilla was rediscovered by non-Africans in the 19th century, the Periplus account of the beast was remembered, and that's how it got its name. :')

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

It’s always important, when considering desert archaeology, to focus on water. This is because it is the essential element, and there is only three sources in the ancient world that were typically available.

The first is either running water or an annual spring. The deep interest in Artesian wells, where water is pushed up from below ground, was long known in both Syria and Egypt. Such wells were priceless, and were often surrounded by fortifications, being both easier to defend, and important to keep out of enemy hands.

In the absence of groundwater or springs, the other alternatives were man made wells or capturing a brief, annual rain. In the former case, if groundwater was deep, as is often the case in deserts, large excavations were needed underground, not just for recovering water, but as a cool refuge from the hot sun.

In the case of captured rainwater, both enormous live rock cisterns had to be built, and rain drainage had to be designed to direct water to the cistern.

So in the absence of groundwater, the assumption must be that there would be a substantial underground development. The Romans went so far as to mine underground aquifers to transport water miles to where it was needed.

[SunkenCiv]

The great aqueduct built to supply Constantinople kept a purpose-built barrel vaulted cistern which lay under part of the city, and (since it was a planned development, did double duty as a way to level the building surface. :’)

Rome’s Tremendous Tunnel [100 kilometers long, century to dig it]
Speigel | Wednesday, March 11, 2009 | Matthias Schulz
Posted on 03/13/2009 8:35:55 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2206315/posts

Rome’s Tremendous Tunnel
SpiegelOnLine | 03/11/2009 | By Matthias Schulz
Posted on 04/19/2009 4:27:23 AM PDT by Fred Nerks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2232683/posts

Claudius Naumachia on Fucine Lake (Those About To Die, chap III)
Those About To Die (via Kurt Saxon) | 1950s (I believe) | Daniel P. Mannix
Posted on 11/24/2005 7:45:06 AM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1527955/posts

The Tunnel of Samos (Over 1000 Meters Sixth Century BC)
Cal Tech Engineering and Science | N/A | Tom M. Apostol
Posted on 04/03/2009 4:45:40 PM PDT by raybbr
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2221910/posts

[SunkenCiv]

Tamil Brahmi script in Egypt
Hindu.com | 21 Nov 2007 | Hindu.com
Posted on 12/03/2007 7:47:12 AM PST by BGHater
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1933979/posts

pretty much unrelated to Roman trade:

Of lasting genes and lost cities of Tamil Nadu
Hindusantimes | Chennai, January 5 | Papri Sri Raman (Indo-Asian News Service)
Posted on 01/11/2003 1:43:22 PM PST by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/821053/posts

[ckilmer]

thanks. interesting language roots for the word gorilla

[Sherman Logan]

Kind of an idiotic article. It implies there was a long gap between the end of Roman influence in the area and the arrival of the Muslims. While the local Romans got bashed around a bunch in the decades before the Muslim conquest, they were enough in control that the Muslims defeated them in battle and took immediate control of the area. No gap.