19 April 1929

[possibly Agnes Conway]

Mr. Horsfield and A.E.C. went to see the house opposite the theatre, and the Tomb of Onaisu, from which Mr. Horsfield hopes to get the chronology of the Tombs straightened out. He noticed a new type of crenellated tomb in the site, where the crenellations are real battlements. There is an intermediate form of tomb in the Outer Siq in which the crenellations come to the top, but have no cornice.  The house has remains of painted plaster in one room, in a recognizable design, and the room is vaulted.  They went on to Zibb Atuf, and agreed that the obelisks were connected with the quarry and had nothing to do with the Place of Sacrifice.  Mr H. thought the entrance towers Byzantine, and the two on a lower level of a different date, but could not understand them as fortifications.  ​

Obelisk on Zibb Atuf, photographed in 1927. Copyright UCL Institute of Archaeology.

He thinks the cut stone on the rim of the altar of the Great High Place implies some superstructure and suggests that it was a shrine rather than an altar; made perhaps to hold some sacred stone emblem of Dushara which may have stood on the base of the so-called altar of burnt offerings.  Such a stone might easily have been thrown down the hill side. From the stone cutting of the triclinium (?) wall, he thought the work was of the 1st century B.C. Should the altar be a shrine, A.E.C. thought the victims might have been slaughtered beside the round basin, in which the blood might have been collected and poured on the sacred stone. In this case why should a runnel join the round basin to drain liquids into the court?1  On the way up above the theatre they reached the plateau where the snake relief is (better photograph needed).  Mr H. thought this must be a shrine; but the surrounding caves are all houses; some of them very fine ones.  The whole lot are included by Dalman as the 2nd sanctuary of the Theatre-berg!  In the afternoon they visited the silted up caves in the Wady Ma’aisera el Gharbiyah and decided which should be dug tomorrow.
__
[Footnote] 1.  A later dig showed that it did not drain into the court, but ran down the mountain at the back.

Reference:[unsigned, but possibly Conway, A.] 1929 (transcribed by A. Thornton). Petra Exploration Fund Diary. "Business Papers to be Kept", Horsfield Collection Box 8, UCL Institute of Archaeology, 19 April: 44-45.