Did you know zebras and giraffes roamed here before the Suez Canal?
By Eileen Ogintz
MOUNT NEBO, Jordan — If only it weren’t overcast. We are in the exact spot where the Bible says Moses looked across the valley to the Promised Land — to Jerusalem — less than 30 miles away, as well as Lake Tiberius, Bethlehem, and the Dead Sea. The view is a panorama of the West Bank across the Jordan River valley.
“A different view then, certainly,” says our Abercrombie & Kent guide Zakaria Salameh. We are at the beginning of an A&K tour in Jordan that will also take us to Egypt.
Jordanians, who note how safe their country is despite the proximity to Middle East hot spots, have seen the all-important tourism industry decimated since the Israeli-Hamas war. The perception that tourists will face war risk here distresses everyone.
“We watch what is happening in Israel, Gaza and the White House day by day,” said Salameh. “It is critical to us.” He jokes that Jordanians need a magic staff that got water from a rock and was used in parting the Red Sea, as the Bible says Moses did.
Sadly, Moses, after wandering with the Jews in the desert for 40 years, never made it to the promised land. According to the Old Testament, Moses was 120 years old when he arrived here and then died. It is said he is buried here but that has never been proven.
We visited the Moses Memorial Church here that was first built in 530 AD to commemorate where Moses died and was a once large monastery. Today it is administered by the Franciscan Order of the Roman Catholic Church (founded by St. Francis of Assisi). Early Christian pilgrims would stop here on their way to Jerusalem. In 2000, Pope John Paul II visited here and planted an olive tree, which has grown nicely among hundreds of others on the property.
The church contains one of the best complete mosaics in the entire country—a colorful hunting and herding story with an assortment of African and other animals. The area is inside the Great Rift Valley, better known in Africa but which extends all the way from Tanzania to Turkey. Before the digging of the Suez Canal in the late 19th Century, animals would migrate through the Great Rift Valley, so it was not uncommon to find lions, zebras, giraffes, and other species in the Middle East. The mosaic’s story is supposed to show casting demons (represented by the lions) away and the triumph of good (the gazelles) with orange trees depicted in different seasons.
Salameh explained that the reason this mosaic is so well preserved — despite two earthquakes in 1749 and 1927 and the church being rebuilt three times — is because of Pope Leo III, who ruled in the late 700s AD. He didn’t like such symbolism. So, to appease him, the mosaic was covered with other mosaics that now hang in the church. The original wasn’t discovered until 1976.
Today, the Franciscans oversee this church and site which continues to be an important site for Christians to visit. But even such important tourist sites are mostly empty because of the Middle East strife.
Nearby in Madaba is the Queen Noor Foundation, which was established to teach people, especially women in need, how to create mosaics. Queen Noor, an American, was the fourth wife of King Hussein, who ruled Jordan for four decades until his death in 1999. She established this school in 1990 and now it is an accredited two-year program. We watched women working on mosaics of various sizes that can take hundreds of hours of painstaking effort, drawing the scene first in reverse and then gluing tiny pieces of stone onto the drawing (the glue is simple flour and water). Tourists commission special ones costing thousands of dollars — portraits of themselves, their pets, and much more. They are very anxious for business and are hard to resist.
Imagine life without Google maps or any maps for that matter. We also stopped at Madaba, home of St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church that is known around the world as “The Church of the Map.”
That’s because the 6th Century mosaic floor—only about 40 per cent remains—was a map of the region, giving pilgrims directions to the Holy Land. There were 157 captions in Greek, the common language in those days, depicting all the major sites in the Middle East, from Egypt to Palestine. It originally contained millions of pieces. “The pilgrims would go to the church and figure out which way to go,” our guide explained.
Today, a major renovation is under way as is a project to create a complete mosaic replica of the original map outdoors in the town.
I don’t know if I could navigate by memorizing a map I saw in a church. Could you?