The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

The oldest human statues in the world were found in Amman. They are 7500 years old. The shapes were made out of reed and then covered in plaster. They think the lack of detail between the head and the feet might be because the statue used to wear clothes.

 

This one is weird because it has two heads.

The black on the eyes is bitumen from the Dead Sea. Which is a long walk from Amman.

 

They also covered the skulls of the dead with plaster and put shells in their eyes.

These coffins came much later and were probably inspired by the Egyptian sarcophagus. They had a representation of the face on top, you can barely see the nose sticking out now.

This is the dead sea scroll that was made out of bronze. It is basically an ancient treasure map.

It didn’t last very well. It corroded and couldn’t be unrolled, and most of the letters are hard to read.

But the papyrus isn’t much better. This is some document about the rules of the community.

And the parchment has bigger intact chunks but also more chunks missing. This is a pesser, which is kind of a written version of a sermon.

You should definitely carve things into stone if you want them to be readable 2000 years later.

There weren’t that many bugs in Jordan.

The ones we saw moved fast.

So did the lizards.

The amphitheatre in Amman is still in the middle of the city, which looks really funny.

It is pretty well preserved.

Matt was not very impressed.

But it is pretty impressive.

The Amman Citadel is a big archaeological site at the top of a hill in the middle of the city. It was reused in a bunch of different periods.

In the middle is the remains of a church from the 5th century. It was built out of stones taken from the 2nd century Temple of Hercules to the left.

But then the stones from the church were taken to build this mosque in the 8th century.

There are a lot of other old stones from a lot of other old buildings, but they are not as fancy.

There was a huge palace here in the 8th century.

And a huge cistern for drinking water.

The standing columns from the temple of Hercules are huge. That is Matt at the bottom.

It is best known for this giant hand from a statue of Hercules.

Which really isn’t that big, it just looks impressive from that angle because you don’t realise how far away the buildings are.

I mean it’s bigger than Matt’s hand, but it’s just not that impressive.