FWKh 1 (Farʿ Wādī al-Khuḍarī), Al-Mafraq Governorate, Jordan

This site is known in the literature as the Ṯyt of Gb. Over fifty individuals came to honor the memory of a woman called Gb, possibly /gobb/, by constructing a stone enclosure lined with a perimeter of inscriptions. The structure is located on a steep hill overlooking a large tributary of Wādī al-Khuḍarī. It is too far from the wādī bed to serve as a suitable place for monitoring herds, suggesting it was reserved for ritualistic activity. There is a large, looted cairn to the east of the site, but there is no clear association between it and the ṯyt. The inscriptions of the site have been published in Al-Jallad et al. 2026a.

History of Visitation

The site was discovered by A. Al-Jallad and A. Al-Manaser in June 2019 during the BES campaign of that year. The inscriptions were meticulously documented, but no archaeological investigation was possible, as the team lacked a trained archaeologist and excavation equipment. The COVID-19 pandemic prevented the team from returning the following year. It was not until 2024 that BES returned to the site, this time with an archaeologist. Dr. Ali Othman led a small excavation at the site, and the team resurveyed the area.

Archaeological details

The ṯyt appears as a cleared-out space, an enclosure, with the stones on its eastern and western perimeters inscribed with texts commemorating Gb. A large, immovable stone several meters to the northwest also carries a number of inscriptions (BES24_FWKh1 47–53) connected with the memorial. The excavation of the site failed to reveal any burials. A sounding was opened in the stone circle to the east of the ṯyt and another to its south. Both yielded nothing. There was no evidence of a burial in the ṯyt itself. Based on another example of a ṯyt (MH 9) (Al-Jallad et al. 2026a; Al-Jallad 2025c, the current hypothesis is that such structures functioned as cenotaphs, commemorating an individual independently of the location of their body.