Hibabiya (sometimes spelled Habeiba) is the name of the ruins of an early Islamic village, which was located atop the basalt bedrock outcrop immediately adjacent to the Qa Hibabiya mudflat at the fringe of the northeastern desert in what is today Jordan. Pottery collected from the site during its earliest investigations dates to the Late Byzantine-Umayyad [AD 661-750] and/or Abbasid [AD 750-1250] periods of the Islamic Civilization.
The site was largely destroyed by a large quarrying operation in 2008: but examination of documents and artifact collections created in a handful of investigations in the 20th century has allowed scholars to redate the site and place it in context with the newly burgeoning study of Islamic history. A report of the site appeared in the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy in 2011 (Kennedy 2011).
Architecture at Hibabiya
The earliest publication of the site (Rees 1929) describes it as a fishing village with several rectangular houses, and a series of fishtraps jutting into the mudflat. Additional analysis of aerial photos taken then and in the 1950s indicates there were at least 30 individual houses scattered along the edge of the mudflat for a length of some 750 meters (2460 feet), most with between two to six rooms. Several of the houses included interior courtyards, and a few of those were very large, the largest of which measured approximately 40x50 m (130x165 ft). Henry Field, who visited the site in the 1920s, argued that the largest structure was possibly a Roman (or Byzantine) fort.
Investigating Hibabiya
Hibabiya was discovered in 1921 by Royal Air Force pilots flying on a new airmail route across the northeastern desert of Jordan and Iraq. In 1929, Group Captain L.W.B. Rees published an article on the sites the RAF had identified in their flyovers in one of the first issues of the journal Antiquity, which included an aerial photograph of Hibabiya. The site was visited by archaeologist Henry Field in 1927 and 1928; OGS Crawford published his analysis of the site's pottery in the 1930s. A.N. Garrard and N.P. Stanley-Price investigated the site during a survey of sites in the region in the 1970s, but intensive investigations at the site itself (or in the region for that matter) were not performed.
Most of the site of Hibabiya was destroyed by an immense rock quarry and archaeological evidence of all but one of the structures is gone. Investigations of the collected artifacts and historical photographs were conducted by a group from the University of Western Australia, led by David Kennedy.
Kennedy reassessed the interpretation of the site as a "fishing village". He identified what Rees called "fish-traps" as walled gardens, which were built to exploit annual flooding events as irrigation. The location between the Azraq Oasis and the Umayyad/Abbasid site of Qasr el-Hallabat suggested to Kennedy that the site location was probably on a migration route used by nomadic pastoralists. Kennedy argues that Hibabiya was likely a village that was seasonally populated by pastoralists, who took advantage of the grazing opportunities and opportunistic farming possibilities on annual migrations. Numerous desert kites have been identified in the region, lending support to this hypothesis.
The Roman fort hypothesis is possible, says Kennedy: the favorable location of Hibabiya might have enticed the Romans (or more properly, Byzantine, ca 4th-7th centuries AD) to set up a fort here; but it was not the focal point of the village, which would have developed well after the Romans had left.
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the guide to Islamic Civilization, and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Kennedy D. 2011. Recovering the past from above Hibabiya â€" an Early Islamic village in the Jordanian desert? Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 22(2):253-260.
Kennedy D. 2011. The "Works of the Old Men" in Arabia: remote sensing in interior Arabia. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(12):3185-3203.
Rees LWB. 1929. The Transjordan Desert. Antiquity 3(12):389-407.
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