Greek graffito in Jordan’s Black Desert sheds light on early nomadic Christians

AMMAN — The eastern Basalt Desert was a home of a “very intensive” Christian graffiti production during first three centuries AD. Syrian-Jordanian desert was the frontier between the Roman Empire and Sassanian Empire during late Roman and early Byzantine periods. 

Thousands of drawings, tags, prayers, personal records and names testify about this activity in a desolated place and scholars try to reconstruct the life of ancient tribes by studying the meaning of this graffiti.

These graffiti are the work of nomadic pastoralist who inhabited the Black Desert and are a point of research for international and Jordanian archaeological teams.

Compared to Safaitic inscriptions, graffiti in ancient Greek are rare. One of the Greek graffito was found in 2010 with the corpus of Safaitic inscriptions by Jordanian independent historian and researcher Rafe Harahsheh. 

The location of the graffito is 35 kilometres east of Azraq, deep into the desert.

It is hardly surprising that, in addition to prehistoric sites and graffiti, many of more recent drawings and texts have been spotted in the area, said Professor Hani Hayajneh from Yarmouk University.

The professor added that the first batch of the Safaitic inscriptions was discovered by Captain Lionel Rees, a British pilot and World War I ace, in 1920s. Later, the American researcher Piere Bikai, a former director of American Centre of Research in Amman presented in 2009 30 Safaitic documents, chosen from the set of 125 texts inscribed on 77 stones.

“In 2010, an epigraphic survey of the basaltic hills and valley east of Qa Al Muqalla was carried out by Harahsheh while he worked for the Department of Antiquities of Jordan: a large number of Safaitic and Greek, Nabataean, early Islamic and Mamluk inscriptions was documented," Hayajneh said.

An edition of the new Greek inscription is intended as a supplement to all these fieldwork, Hayajneh noted.

The text is incised on a basalt pebble left in its row state approximately 40 centimetres high, 50cm wide and 20cm thick. The handwriting is influenced by cursive script.

Remarkably, the author of the inscription began to the first word of the text before realising that there was not enough space and starting again further down, the professor said, adding that the translation of the inscription states- Remember Toulos, son of Ietouros, who wrote this.

This graffito is one of records that documents a person or a prolonged stay in one place.

“Although it's quite common, it should be noted, however, that there is a mixture of two types of wording to emphasise that the mentioned person was both the one who wished to be commemorated and the one who actually engraved the text,” Hayajneh underscored.