Returning a Rock
The aspiration to possess part of the Holy Land appears to be wide-spread among both tourists and pilgrims. Several times on our tours we have had people who picked up a pebble - a totally non-descript pebble - from every site we visited. How they told them apart when they got home beats me, but if it gave them satisfaction, it's fine by me. It might puzzle geologists in the future who have to account for non-glacial erratics - Middle Eastern stones in Australia or Britain - but again, that's fine by me too.
Things get more serious when the person involved wants an actual man-made object, but again, a tiny fragment of pottery isn't really a problem. After all, at the end of our excavations each year the Israeli archaeologist who supervises us on behalf of the Israeli Antiquities Authority invites the group members to help themselves from the pile of discarded pottery found during the excavations. In addition, anything found on the surface is practically worthless as it lacks any stratigraphical context. On the whole, therefore, although I certainly don't encourage people to do so, provided the piece is small and from the surface, I turn a blind eye. For all I know, it might be from a modern pot dropped by a careless picnicker.
Quite how these collectors of stones and pottery fragments get on when it comes time to check in their luggage I don't know. Most people are pretty close to the limit in any case and by the time you add in legitimate souvenirs - guide books, t-shirts and postcards - I suspect they rely on the mercy of check-in staff to get their overweight bags onto the plane home.
Which is why my mind boggles slightly over the story of an American tourist who visited Israel twelve years ago and returned home with a souvenir chunk of rock that weighed 46lb. That is more than your whole luggage allowance!
Apparently he spotted the piece of what looks like marble while visiting an excavated site in Israel and decided that it would make the ideal souvenir. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands and the guide, seeing that it had no identifying marks on it which might allow it to be replaced in whatever its original position was, told him he could keep it. (We have no comments from the guide on what he thought of the American's mentality!) The delighted tourist staggered back onto the bus, lugging this huge chunk of stone, staggered off the bus and into his hotel, where he somehow crammed it into his luggage for the flight back home.
We have no indication of what the security people thought as this mini-boulder showed up on all their x-ray screens - and even if the Americans, in those pre-11/9 days were lax on security, there is no way he could have flown out of Tel Aviv without a thorough check of his luggage - but somehow he made it back to the US and ...
Well, we don't know what happened next. Did he put the stone on his mantlepiece? He must have specially reinforced it if he did! Was it left in the garden as a talking point during barbeques? Did he use it as a doorstop and trip over it every time he entered the house? We simply don't know.
What we do know is that for some reason his conscience began, quite unnecessarily, to bother him. "For the past twelve years since then, rather than remind me of the prayer for Jerusalem, I am reminded of the mistake I made when I removed the stone from its proper place in Israel," he said in an e-mail to the Israeli Antiquities Authority.
Mind you, repentance has its limits: the gentleman concerned confessed his "sin" to his priest and it is the priest who got in touch with the IAA to arrange the return of the stone. The "thief" carefully remains anonymous - not that he needs to worry. The Israelis are accepting the stone back as a matter of principle and Shay Bar Tura, deputy director of the IAA, has grandiloquently announced that they will not seek to prosecute the man, but exactly what they are going to do with the stone I have no idea.
Even if the man can remember which archaeological site he got it from - and that is highly dubious - he won't remember which part of the site it came from and the chances of it being reunited with its parent fallen pillar or shattered building block are so slim as to be non-existent. My betting is that it will end up being a door stop in the IAA offices, or perhaps an addition to Shay Bar Tura's rock garden.
Still, I guess that if the story has a moral it is this: if you want souvenirs of the Holy Land, restrict yourself to t-shirts and post cards, or olive wood camels and mother-of-pearl brooches. You'll never feel guilty about them. (And if, by any chance, you have managed to smuggle a huge chunk of anonymous stone out of Israel or Egypt, pop down to your local museum and see if they'll take it rather than adding several tons of carbon to the atmosphere by flying it back to its country of origin.)
discarded pottery All pottery, no matter how small the piece, is carefully collected, washed and then assessed by the superviser. Although it may grieve the person who found it, even a large piece from the side of a bowl or jar tells you very little unless it is decorated or bears an inscription: the important parts are rims, handles and bases. There simply is not room in Israeli museums to store every single fragment of pottery! As a result, outside the site office there is an ever-growing pile of discarded pottery fragments and if its size can be reduced by allowing tour members to rummage through it for "souvenirs", that can only be a Good Thing. Return
highly dubious I was recently approached by someone asking for help in identifying a photograph he had taken of a Roman theatre "near Jericho". I was intrigued, as I had not heard of a Roman theatre being discovered anywhere near Jericho - though it is possible, I suppose, that Herod might have built one to go with his palace in the city. The photograph turned out to be of the Roman Theatre in Beth Shean, which is "near Jericho" in the sense that Melbourne is near Sydney or Miami is near New York. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
