Jean Marie Vance and Dr. David Johnson, Anthropology
The Nabataean kingdom existed as an independent entity from about 3rd century BC to 1st century AD and continued to exist through the 3rd century AD as a province of the Roman Empire. The Nabataeans flourished as traders and they were able to establish their capital city at Petra. With the development of trade among the Nabataeans came an influx of ideas and technologies among those ideas was stylistic considerations involved with art – in particular frescos.
Fresco is an art form that consists of painting on wet or dry plaster. In the Middle East there are several forms of plaster/fresco used by the inhabitants of that region. Decorative plaster involved the use of plaster in the form of architectural features, faces or the popular rosette image. Flat plaster was also used as decoration. It is found in temples, tombs and living structures throughout the area. However, frescos are hard to preserve and there are seldom any complete frescos found in the area. The nature of my project was to document a fresco recently discovered in a tomb in the Wadi Al-Mahata, Petra, Jordan.
As part of the process of documenting this fresco I took pictures, both color and infrared, I sketched the images and a detailed drawing proportionally drawn to scale was also constructed. The fresco was badly deteriorated, but I was able to isolate three major portions that had discernable images (Fig 1). Because the fresco was so badly damaged, I was only able to discern a few images to analyze. It was those images that I used in my interpretation of this fresco.
Most of my research was done in the library, after I had photographed the fresco. In my research I attempted to find contemporary frescos similar in style to the fresco found in Wadi Al-Mahata. However, I discovered that most of the frescoes found in Jordan and surrounding areas are Hellenistic in style. This style, borrowed from the Romans, is polychromatic, realistic in its depictions of images, and three dimensional in its treatment of shading and use of lines. The images found in the Wadi Al-Mahata fresco are monochromatic, two-dimensional, are very flat and stick-like in appearance. It is also much cruder in construction compared to the other frescos that I found in my research.
Because I had no similar frescos to compare the Wadi Al-Mahata fresco to, I expanded my search to find other images that were similar in composition, subject matter or style. This search led me to look at Nabataean pottery and rock art. There are several characteristics seen in pottery and rock art that are similar to those found in the fresco. Several images found on pottery that I found reflected the same crude appearance as the images in the Wadi Al-Mahata fresco. In particular there is a pattern found on several vessels that Nabil Khairy called “trellis” patterning (1987). This “trellising” is similar to cross-hatching found on several parts of the fresco. Another similarity between pottery and the fresco is both are monochromatic, using a single color in their construction.
In the 1950’s Emmanuel Ananti did a survey in the Negev region on the Middle East documenting rock art found in the area. He divided the images he found into phases with one of the phases corresponding to the span of the Nabataean kingdom. He described the rock art from this phase as “schematized and linear. The drawings . . . are static repetitions” (1955:33). This is also an accurate description of the images in the Wadi Al-Mahata fresco. The fresco images appear to be static representations of objects found in real life.
As part of my analysis of the fresco, I looked at its surroundings and found several indications that this area probably had ritualistic uses. The presence of a water channel in a chamber above the fresco, a niche on the facade of the tomb, and the potential of this chamber to be a triclinium, are all indication that this was used as a ritualistic site. Some of the images in the fresco would also indicate that there was use of symbolism and ritual in the fresco itself.
The conclusions that I drew after analyzing this fresco was that it is of a much earlier date than the other frescos found in Jordan and the surrounding areas. I believe that its similarities in content and style of contemporary rock art indicate an earlier dating. Also, the lack of any Hellenistic characteristic would indicate that it was constructed at an earlier data before the Roman Empire had a significant influence over the Nabataeans.
There is still additional work that can be done on this fresco and the surrounding areas. An excavation of the chamber where this fresco is found has the potential to reveal additional artifacts to date the fresco as well as reveal the purpose of the chamber and fresco. As more and more areas of Petra are excavated, the chances of frescos similar to this being discovered are great. If new frescos are discovered, comparisons between frescos would also aid in understanding more about this early form of Nabataean art.