From Groton to Jordan: An Ancient Temple's Story

A recently published archaeology book about a remote ancient temple is infused with the efforts of several Grotonians.

A Gem of a Small Nabataean Temple was co-written by Hannah Wellman ’08, designed by Hanna Kim ’17, and translated into Arabic by a Diana Sayegh ’14. Over several years, Classics teacher Andres Reyes ’80 helped survey Khirbet et-Tannur, the religious sanctuary where the Nabataean temple was unearthed, about forty-five miles from Petra, Jordan. His work was supported in part by Groton’s Dillon Fund.

The book’s launch, celebrated November 24 at Oxford University, also marks the rebirth of the Groton School Press, which began operating in 1908 but had been dormant since 1985. Dr. Reyes decided to revive the imprint to encourage the scholarly work of students and alumni. A Gem of a Small Nabataean Temple was jointly published by Manar al-Athar/Oxford University and Groton School Press.

Judith McKenzie, professor of Late Antique Egypt and the Holy Land at Oxford University, was the primary archaeologist on this project and Dr. Reyes the assistant director; they co-edited the new book. The two have worked together since they were archaeology fellows at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, in the early 1990s.

“I’m glad she lets me hold the end of the measuring tape,” said Dr. Reyes, who described the project as putting the temple back together “from a pile of stones on a hilltop between Biblical Edom and Moab.” Archaeologist Nelson Glueck had surveyed the site in the 1930s, but many of the relics he collected were largely forgotten until they were discovered in the basement of the Harvard Semitic Museum in 2002.

Needing a writer who could turn dense archaeological tomes into this forty-nine-page book, Dr. Reyes thought of his former Groton student, Hannah Wellman ’08. She was completing an internship at the Smithsonian when he called. The goal was ambitious: to boil down more than seven hundred detailed, highly academic pages into something readable and accessible. Hannah said she “cherry-picked the most interesting bits. I was trying to distill two volumes into forty pages of highlights and write in a way that was accessible to a non-archaeologist.”

Hannah, now a doctoral student at the University of Oregon specializing in zooarchaeology, was fascinated by the relics she described. “That human connection comes through,” she said, admitting that she became “obsessed with” a particular stone vegetation goddess. “We can have an emotional response to it in the present and imagine that people were having an emotional response to it in the past.” Hannah co-wrote A Gem of a Small Nabataean Temple with Marlena Whiting, who was then a post-doctoral student at Oxford.

Once ready for design, Dr. Reyes approached one of his advisees, Hanna Kim ’17. “He knew I had experience with inDesign and Photoshop,” Hanna explained. Grateful for Dr. Reyes' years of keen guidance, she didn’t hesitate. The project spanned two summers.

Hanna traveled to Oxford to meet Dr. McKenzie and others involved with the project. Through prior summer internships at the Harvard Semitic Museum, she had come to know some of the artifacts from the site. “I had a really multidimensional experience with this project,” she said. Dr. Joseph Greene, deputy director at the Harvard museum, also provided extensive guidance.

Hanna helped bring the copy to life with photos, many of them from the Manar-al-Athar archive at Oxford—and with guidance (and “hundreds of emails”) from Dr. McKenzie. “The original book was two thick volumes. This reads like a story,” Hanna said. “I wanted it to visually read like a narrative, to have a storybook feel.”

Hanna isn’t quite finished working on archaeological texts. Dr. Reyes already has asked her to design and co-author the next Groton School Press project: a book on the Ethiopian legend of Solomon and Sheba by Sarah Norodom ’09, who also studied Classics at Oxford (and with Dr. Reyes at Groton).

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