Moab’s Northern Border: Khirbat al-Mudayna on the Wadi ath-Thamad

The Iron Age nation/state of Moab is known from biblical texts that mention its wars with Israel (2 Kgs 1:1, 3:4-5), from the royal inscription of its king, Mesha, who boasted of his successes, and from the inscriptions of its seventh century Assyrian overlords (Dearman 1989). The precise geographical limits and the cultural characteristics of ancient Moab are less well known. The Moabites float in our imagination somewhere east of the Dead Sea, north of Edom and south of Ammon. But this haziness has begun to be resolved. Thanks to the extensive survey of Miller, central Moab south of the Wadi al-Mūjib has been intensively explored, and the published results have encouraged new excavation projects, such as the work of Routledge (1995:236) at Mudaynat ‘Aliya and of Mattingly (1996:69) on the Karak plateau (1995). The assessment of the character of settlement north of the Wadi al-Mūjib has depended primarily on the excavations at the Moabite city of Dibon (modern Dhibān) by Canadian archaeologists Winnett (Winnett and Reed 1964) and Tushingham (1972) in the 1950s. Though they uncovered only a limited amount of Iron Age architecture, they recovered important Iron Age pottery from tombs. The similarity of this ceramic material with that collected by Glueck and Miller formed the foundation for Moabite ceramic typology.1 While it is clear that this Moabite style of pottery appears at Iron Age sites south of Dhibān, the extent of its distribution further north remains to be determined. Current excavations at Khirbat al-Mudayna on the Wadi ath-Thamad (Daviau) and at Madaba (Harrison 1997) represent the beginning of this search for Moab’s northern border. Only an elaborate study of large collections of such pottery and its association with other features of the material culture from Iron Age sites will succeed in determining the degree to which these cultural correlates are indicators of ethnicity (Finkelstein 1996:203) and bring the nation/state of Moab into archaeological focus

A Moabite Sanctuary at Khirbat al-Mudayna

The discovery at Khirbat al-Mudayna on the Wadi ath-Thamad of a small temple within a walled town in central Jordan is a first for ancient Moab. This building, identified as a sanctuary on the basis of its plastered benches and limestone altars, is not a national temple with direct access entry. Rather, it is a local sanctuary, with indirect access from an alleyway that runs parallel to the south wall of the innermost room of the six-chambered gate. This paper includes a report on Sanctuary 149, excavated during the 1999 season. Of greatest interest are the three stone altars; two are painted, and one is also inscribed. These altars, each of a different type, suggest the range of cultic activities practiced in such a temple. Due to its position adjacent to the gate and to its construction history, the sanctuary probably dates to the early eighth century B.C

Economy-Related Finds from Khirbat al-Mudayna (Wadi ath-Thamad, Jordan)

In a recent study of the characteristics of early states, Steiner suggests that Iron Age Moab had two economic spheres: the royal economy and the local economy. The local sphere consists of the economy of people living in villages and in small, fortified towns, and of the pastoral population. While agriculture was the backbone of this economy, crafts and industries such as pottery production, metalworking, and the production of textiles were designed to meet the needs of the local market. As more evidence becomes available through current excavations, this description of one facet of a small state’s economic organization can now be tested against the archaeological record. Finds from a pillared industrial building in the fortified town of Khirbat al-Mudayna on the Wadi ath-Thamad include two inscribed scale weights and one uninscribed weight. Also recovered from Iron Age contexts are seven seals and three bullae. Although this corpus is small in number, it represents a group of artifacts directly related to the local economy and includes the first occurrence of inscribed weights in Moab. This paper presents those weights, seals, and bullae in their archaeological context and studies their implications