Grand Mosque of Sana'a

My posting has recently been late and rare. I'm currently in a class with two Europeans, a Dane and a German, with a greater breadth of Arabic than myself, and I've been consumed by work in the language - that, plus four contiguous hours of class a day plus trekking out to the gym leaves little time to blog for the benefit of my mother and those stumbling on this page from misspelled Google searches. Anyway...
Today we made a visit to the Grand Mosque of Sana'a. At 1,400 years old it's one of the oldest mosques in the world; in fact, it's generally placed as the third oldest. As a widely-followed rule, non-Muslims are barred from entering mosques, but we were able to visit the sections of the mosque that are currently being renovated (they started several years ago and think they'll be finished by 2014). In the first section we were in the first thing I noticed was the pit dug in the ground; small sections of the mosque have been given the green light for archeological digs down, down, down to the original floor of the building about 12 feet down. As time has gone by and the land changed, the mosque's floor has crept up centimeters at a time. The side of the hole had dozens of lines, over a hundred distinct levels as the floor slowly grew closer to the carved wood of the ceiling - if the pattern continues, in one or two hundred years even the diminutive Yemenis will have to stoop under the arches connecting the room's columns.
The mosque is also old enough that, squirreled away in the walls and the ceiling, wooden blocks with carvings of animals and even people were found (images of people and animals are generally frowned upon in Islam) in addition to the discovery of old versions of the Qur'an that were kept hidden by the mosque's keepers for some time; much like the Bible, the Qur'an went through several revisions and variations in the early years until a universal version was established. Such early versions are very rare and clergy approach them with trepidation - they cannot be destroyed as they are part of the holy Qur'an but they definitely can't just be left lying around or, even worse, disseminated. Thus, centuries upon centuries ago, some enterprising people stuffed the manuscripts into a space between the ceiling and the roof, much like they placed the wooden animal carvings behind niches and inside walls in the hope that ages of neglect will solve their catch-22.
There are no pictures as they weren't allowed - there are future publications envisioned by the archaeologist in charge and his cohort of helpers, and photos of the work in progress would put a damper on the surprises of any papers. And I'm trying to post an entry on the Island of Kamaran in the Red Sea but my camera's deciding that it would rather not transfer its photos.