JORDAN: In A.D. 749 the city of Jerash was hit by a devastating earthquake. The temblor just happened to strike at a time when the owners of the so-called House of the Tesserae were in the midst of renovations. The property was subsequently abandoned, with work on the house never completed. It has now been discovered that one room had been temporarily converted into storage for construction materials and contains thousands of pristine white marble tesserae intended for the house’s new mosaics. —Jason Urbanus