Dangling Assyriology

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In the mountains of Edom, in southern Jordan, the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus (r. 556–539 B.C.) chose a rocky promontory called Sela (the “rock”) to leave a testimony of his military exploits in the region. In the promontory’s eastern façade, Nabonidus ordered the carving of a monument in the soft sandstone. Now rather eroded, the approximately 10-by-6.5-foot monument consists of a cuneiform inscription and a relief of Nabonidus holding a long staff in his right hand, while lifting his left hand to his mouth in the well-known Mesopotamian gesture of prayer. Three astral symbols appear in front of him: a moon, solar disk, and star. The king wears a long robe and conic crown, the characteristic attire of a Babylonian monarch.

Sela is known from the Bible as the Edomites’ mountain stronghold (2 Kings 14:7; 2 Chronicles 25:12;026 Isaiah 42:11). Deep ravines and wadis surround the site, making it difficult to access—and strategically defensible.

Although Sela appears in the works of Czech explorer and theologian Alois Musil and German theologian Gustaf Dalman from the early 1900s, it was Colonel Frederick G. Peake (aka Peake Pasha), commander of the Arab Legion, who actually identified the site—but not the inscription—in the 1920s. Peake notified American archaeologist Nelson Glueck, who conducted the first survey of the site in 1937. Later visitors included Roland de Vaux, Peter Parr, James Leslie Starkey, John R. Bartlett, and the formidable Crystal Bennett.

Manfred Lindner made a surface survey in the 1970s, and Stephen Hart included it in his 1984 survey of Edom. Archaeologist Burton MacDonald and his team undertook further surface surveys between 1999 and 2001. The late Hamed K. Qatamine of Mu’tah University discovered the Nabonidus028 monument in the late 1990s, after which it was partially published and visited by other archaeologists and climbers,¹ and excavated at Sela in 2001.

I have been reading inscriptions of Neo-Babylonian kings since 2003—not only in museums and tablet collections around the world, but also in the mountains of northern Lebanon—and have published many editions of them. I currently advise a project that aims at putting all Babylonian royal inscriptions in open access,² so I knew a trip to see Sela’s inscription was inevitable.

I first visited Sela in the spring of 2014. With a group of Spanish archaeologists, I had driven from Amman to meet a representative of the Department of Antiquities, who was to take us to the site. The winding road connecting the modern village of as-Sila with the site—a distance of about 1 mile—was not then paved, and our car could not make it. But a kind shepherd drove us in his truck to the area closest to the foot of the cliff. A young lad from the visitor center in as-Sila came along to show us the exact location of the inscription, while I repeated one of the few sentences I can construct in my macaronic Arabic: Kitaaba maalik qadiim, hoon? (“The inscription of the ancient king, here?”)

We walked 600 yards to the wadi, and the lad pointed to an undetermined spot midway between the wadi and summit. As the façade was facing east, and it was around 11 a.m., the sun blurred the contours of the rock. No wonder the monument had gone unnoticed to most visitors! But since I had seen it in publications and was used to representations of Neo-Babylonian monarchs, I soon identified it and cried with delight, “Kitaaba maalik qadiim, hoon!”

Three hundred feet above the wadi, Nabonidus looked down at us. From afar he seemed small but at the same time powerful: The king of Babylon had conquered this place on his way to Tayma in Arabia and had left his inscription for the future! There we were, more than 2,000 years later, contemplating this impressive display of imperial rhetoric.

The summit of Sela, 600 feet above the surrounding terrain, can be reached by a stairway carved into the rock (probably during the Iron Age). Its entrance is well protected by a tower, and access is gained through a gateway. We went up to the summit and spent the day there. The site was much larger than previous surveys had indicated, and its archaeological potential seemed enormous. We 029found innumerable rock-cut houses and more than a hundred structures related to water management, which had been crucial for the inhabitants of Sela throughout time. The surface pottery revealed the site had been occupied during the last phase of the Iron Age II (eighth–sixth centuries B.C.) and the Nabatean (fourth century B.C.–first century A.D.), Ayyubid/Mamluk (seventh–16th centuries A.D.), and Late Islamic/Ottoman (16th–20th centuries A.D.) periods.

We also realized that the inscription and the relief were impossible to reach—carved as they are on a vertical wall 300 feet above the wadi, not far from the staircase leading to the summit. Such a monument could only be studied by using a drone (banned in Jordan for the time being), building scaffolding (comfortable to work from, undoubtedly, but complicated and expensive to arrange), or rappelling.

Back in Barcelona, I began considering the options and decided to launch the Sela Archaeological Project. I directed two archaeological campaigns, in 2015 and 2016, to survey the site, make some soundings, and study its water management structures.³ I wanted to get as much information about that incredible place as possible with the hope of providing an archaeological context for the Nabonidus Inscription. At the same time, I was considering the possibilities of preparing an expedition to climb to the monument but was uncertain how to proceed.

At the end of February 2017, I gave a lecture about Sela at the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid, where I mentioned the difficulties posed by the study of a monument in such a location. A colleague had come to the lecture with his friend Arcadio Noriega, an experienced professional climber and amateur archaeologist who immediately offered me his selfless collaboration. Between March 2017 and September 2018, I met many times with Arcadio and his incredible team of climbers and specialists in mountain rescue: Raúl Mejías, David González, and Alex López Estacio. We discussed the details, budget, and schedule, and we also climbed and abseiled together. To get used to the conditions of the work, they even reproduced a Sela with chalk on the wall of a limestone cliff at Sacedón, in central Spain.

While I struggled with the massive paperwork030 that such an expedition involved, the resourceful Alex was able to get the equipment for the expedition: hundreds of feet of ropes, pulleys, helmets, chest blockers, harnesses, carabiners, and the absolute star: an Italian Kong Cevedale tripod—a massive and appropriately branded tripod capable of lowering and raising two climbers at once—to hold me during the work on the inscription.

At the end of September 2018, we left for Jordan with the equipment. Once in Amman, we joined archaeologists Mohammad Najjar from Amman and Michael Herles from Munich, as well as the cook Abu Jamil, Najjar’s friend and right-hand man. After a brief visit to the Department of Antiquities to fulfill the necessary administrative aspects of the mission, we left for Sela taking the Desert Highway (which follows part of the King’s Highway, the main north-south thoroughfare of ancient Jordan). We arrived at an unfinished house being built near Tafila by Abu Jamil’s cousin, which we used as a base camp for the duration of the mission.

The work in Sela took several days, and the climbing equipment was useful in every task we undertook—from examining the water cisterns to exploring the nearby mountains. But, of course, the main endeavor of the mission was to study the inscription. On September 23, we left very early for Sela, fully aware of the long day ahead. It was a warm and sunny day, and the first part of the operation was carried out during the morning. It involved installing a railing for security to safely bring the climbing gear and the Assyriologist (i.e., me) as close to the monument as possible.

The second and hardest undertaking was performed during the hottest hours of the day. It entailed setting the tripod some 30 feet above the vertical plane of the inscription and securing it to the rock with ropes, slings, and webbing. Once the tripod was firmly installed and secured above the inscription, they proceeded to lower me down to the inscription.

I had expressed my wish to have both hands free to work and to avoid touching the fragile sandstone with my boots, so the tripod was installed at an angle that suspended me 1.5 feet away from the façade of the rock. I could not use my feet, and my hands were full of equipment, so the crew had to pull me up and down like a marionette: Raúl operated the winches of the tripod, while Arcadio and Alex assisted him with the ropes. The view was glorious, yet I felt like I was riding on a roller coaster. After a few minutes of awe and terror, I began to enjoy it enormously.

The remains of the cuneiform inscription and blurred contours of Nabonidus were finally within reach. Dangling next to me, David helped photograph and measure the monument. For nearly an hour (although I was completely unaware of the passing time), we worked and admired the magnificent view with the whole valley lying at our feet—emulating Sir Henry Rawlinson’s exploits in Behistun.

As the sun started to go down, creating long shadows on the rocks, a sparrow hawk began performing overhead stunts above us, and the deep voice of the muezzin calling for prayer from as-Sila’s mosque filled the valley. We called it a day, and Raúl pulled me up. The mission had been a success. We were all bruised, sweaty, and tired—but incredibly satisfied.

There were two things, however, that intrigued031 us: First, how had they carved the monument? And, second, why did they carve it precisely on that spot? The promontory was full of large rock surfaces, much easier to reach than this particular place, so why exert the effort to place it there?

To answer the first question, we decided to explore the rock’s whole façade. On September 24, we abseiled from the inscription down to the wadi looking for evidence of a possible system used to carve the monument, and we found it. The façade had many holes into which the ends of poles or beams from a scaffolding of sorts could have been inserted. Further, the rock’s surface had been chiseled at certain places, probably to adjust beams or platforms to support the scaffolding.

To answer the second question, we went back to the place above the inscription, where the tripod had been installed, and realized that the rock-cut stairway was perfectly visible from there. Was the stairway the only access to the site? If it had been, the people living on the promontory had complete visual control of Sela’s access from the rock above the monument, where we were standing at that precise moment. If we could demonstrate that this was the only possible approach to the site, the location of the monument would acquire a new significance.

So the following day, we walked for more than 13 hours around the whole promontory—the perimeter was approximately 7 miles—to check alternative approaches to the summit, as well as paths, or any other evidence of human activity. As the wadis032 around Sela were difficult to negotiate, climbing equipment was necessary at all times. The careful inspection of the contour of the mountain revealed that the site of Sela was (and still is) accessible only through its eastern side, where the rock-cut stairway is located.

This means that Sela was a mountain stronghold, a real fortress. Upon conquering it with his army at the beginning of his reign, Nabonidus chose to leave an enduring reminder of his presence by carving an inscription in the most crucial and strategic place of the whole promontory—its eastern side, where residents of the fortress and those contemplating an attack could see it. At the height of the fortress’s life, the inscription had prime placement.⁴

This is how I ended up suspended at the end of a rope 300 feet above the wadi floor in the Plateau of Edom. And this is why an ancient Babylonian ruler—King Nabonidus—chose to commission a monumental inscription in his own honor halfway up a 600-foot-tall mountain: He wanted to commemorate a crowning military achievement with an equally impressive architectural achievement. And almost 2,600 years later, the confluence of technology, archaeology, mountaineering, and a spirit of adventure has allowed us to bring Nabonidus’s monumental inscription to the rest of the world.

In the sixth century B.C.E., the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus inscribed imperial propaganda on a cliff at Sela, a mountain fortress in modern Jordan. Assyriologist Rocío Da Riva goes to great heights to study this hard-to-reach inscription.