8 September 2024
Zeidan Kafafi, professor emeritus of Yarmouk University, writes:
“In the academic year 1967–1968 I enrolled as a student at the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Jordan. Unfortunately, in that same period the Arab-Israeli Six Days War began on June 5, 1967. As a result of the war, in 1968 the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR; now the American Society for Overseas Research), already based in Jerusalem, decided to establish an archaeological research center in Amman. For this purpose, they rented a building located very close to the third circle in Amman that belonged to one of the members of the Khalifeh family.
“During that time, we had Egyptian and Syrian professors, and in 1969 one of them, namely Greco-Roman specialist Fawzi Fakharani, decided to take nine of us students to visit the so-called Temple of Hercules on the Amman Citadel. During our visit we visited the excavation of American archaeologist Rudolph Dornemann. That was my first experience with American archaeologists.”
