Sam Harrelson

User Gauis Caecilius is posting pics of Jerash (Gerash) in Syria on his Flickr page. Beautiful stuff if you're interested in the Roman Empire and it's reach into Palestine and Syria.

The Phyrgian cap.

One of my main passions offline is research into Dura Europos. I had the privilege to catalogue, photograph and work with much of what remains of Dura Europos' artwork while a grad student at Yale (Yale led the Dura Europos excavations in the 1930's and brought thousands and thousands of pieces back to the Yale Art Gallery where much of it resides in the basement of the ...

I look forward to visiting Dura Europos myself one day.  Here's a fun travel-logue by a traveler:  Dura Europos was certainly the most attractive archaeological site I visited in Syria. A ruined citadel sits atop a ridge overlooking the river and a large city wall that is still defined in several places bounds the entire site. Numerous temple remains dot the site but virtually nothing remains ...

Bible Geek rejoicing... Vol 2 of the new New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (D-H) just arrived in the mail.  I signed up to receive the set at the Society of Biblical Literature conference this past spring in Nashville. Now I can look up Josiah, Hezekiah, Eschatology and Edom. Good stuff!

Great use of Yahoo Pipes and Netscape for history and archaeology studies. I'm going to put something like this together in terms of early urban Christianity... Following Alan?s experiment with Yahoo! Pipes I thought I?d have a quick play and see if anything interesting could be done with it. What I?ve done is aggregate Netscape feeds to produce something like an historical / archaeological version of Digg. Pipes and ...

My favorite topic of study is Dura Europos, a town/fortress/garrison on the Euphrates in modern day Syria. The town was inhabited from about 300 BCE to the late 300's CE.  Fascinating place that is constantly on my mind. Here's a neat new site that doesn't have a focus on Dura, but does include various sites around ancient Syria. You're able to see the sites in3D similar to what Google ...

Here's a paper (and the basis for my PhD thesis) I banged out covering the issue of Midrashic understanding of the paintings in the synagogue at Dura Europos... dura-paper-spring-2007-williams-february-26-2007-gwu-2.pdf What is Dura Europos, you ask? Ah, well... you have homework!