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BIBLICAL ARCH MARCH1977

VOLUME 40 NUMBERI

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The Beth Shemesh Cave

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Published with the financial assistance of ZION RESEARCH FOUNDATION Boston, Massachusetts A nonsectarian Protestant foundation for the study of the Bible and the history of the Christian Church

Biblical Archeologist is published quarterly (March, May, September, December) by the American Schools of Oriental Research in cooperation with Scholars Press. Its purpose is to provide the general reader with an accurate scholarly yet easily understandableaccount of archeological discoveries, and their bearing on the biblical heritage. Unsolicited mss. are welcome but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all to Biblical editorial correspondence Archeologist, 1053 LSA Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Address business correspondence to Scholars Press, P.O. Box 5207, Missoula, MT 59806.

Copyright @ 1977 AXmerican Schools of Oriental Research. Annual Subscription: $10.00. Current single issues: $2.50. Printed in the United States of America, Printing Department, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.

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Editor: David Noel Michigan

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Editorial Committee: Frank M. Cross., Harvard University Edward F. Campbell, Jr., McCormick Theological Seminary John S. Holladay, Jr., University of Toronto H. Darrell Lance, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School

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Credits:

Detail from Cover Stalagmite from the Beth Shemesh cave pictured on the front cover. A fit setting for Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," this cave was blasted into view in 1967, when a routine charge in the Hartuv rock quarry opened a door onto stalactites, stalagmites, and travertineformations unique in the Mediterrenean region. Surely the most beautiful cave in Israel, and a place of wonder anywhere, it is now unfortunately closed to visitors. Installations are currently being constructedfor the mutual protection of the public and the cavern, and to permit controlled visits.

Cover photograph courtesy of Itzhak Amit. All illustrations in "Along Jerusalem's Walls," courtesy of Magen Broshi. Drawings for "The Birth of Bureaucracy"and "TheThird Wall of Agrippa I," and maps for "The Third Wall of Agrippa I"and "The Nuzi Ebla"by Valerie M. Fargo. Photographs in "The Renascence of Iron Age Arad," courtesy of Jackson Campbell. Photographs in "Oil from the Presses of Tirat-Yehuda"and "The Musicians of Ashdod," by courtesy of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums. Drawing and photograph of the Nuzi map originally appeared in Excavations at Nuzi, Vol. 3, Harvard Semitic Series, 10 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935).

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BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST Magen Broshi

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ALONG JERUSALEM'S WALLS

Emmet W. Hamrick

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THE THIRD WALL OF AGRIPPA I

Clyde Curry Smith

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THE BIRTH OF BUREAUCRACY

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OIL FROMTHE PRESSESOF

IN BRIEF Ruth Hestrinand Zeev Yeivin

TIRAT- YEHUDA

Nadezhda Freedman

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THENUZI EBLA

Jackson Campbell

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THE RENASCENCE OF IRON AGE ARAD

Moshe Dothan

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THE MUSICIANS OF ASHDOD

LETTER TO THE READERS

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BOOK REVIEWS

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NEWS FROM THE FIELD

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COLOPHON

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AIA REPORT

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A LETTER TO THE READERS

revealed that they were written in Sumerian cuneiform script, and that two languages are represented on them: Sumerian itself, as expected, and a Semitic dialect the exact classification of which with its specific affinities and characteristics remains to be determined. Thanks, however, to the presence of a multiplicity of bilingual lexical texts containing extensive word-lists (the equivalent of a modern two-language vocabulary or pocket dictionary) and previous experience on the part of scholars with both Sumerianand Semitic texts of roughly the same period, as well as the efficiency and acumen of the epigrapher, the tablets have already yielded substantial information about the life and times of ancient Ebla. Since at the date of this writing, no single tablet has yet been published with photographs, transcription, translation, and comments, all conclusions must be reckoned tentative, and all positions provisional, pending confirmation or correction, or abandonment in this fluid early period of analysis and speculation. who dates the finds between 2400 and 2250 B.C.E.,and the Nevertheless, on the basis of available evidence, it seems in reasonable to propose that the period of Ebla's greatest are Professors Giovanni Pettinato (both epigrapher, the Department of Near EasternStudies at the University prosperity and prestige was during the Early Dynastic of Rome), who prefersan earlierdate, around 2500 B.C.E. Age of the Sumerian city-states in the first half of the 3rd This was no accidentaldiscovery in the sense that so many millennium B.C.E. (until about 2500 B.C.E.). The tablets, most of which are economic in great finds of the past were made by people with no for who either were or looking character, record transactions of the state with experience training at when came or not for else, all, something anything they corresponding entities throughout the Near East and upon some pricelesstreasureof antiquity. It is well known show that Ebla had established commercial and that a couple of goatherds stumbled on the first of the diplomatic relations with other city-states everywhere in Dead Sea scrolls while chasing errant animals, and a the Fertile Crescent, and beyond. Approximately 5,000 camel-driver digging for nitrate-rich soil near a cemetery place-names have been retrieved from the texts by found the Nag Hammadi manuscripts;peasants plowing Professor Pettinato and his assistants, most of which were a field at Ras Shamrah (= ancient Ugarit) came upon the unknown to scholars previously, but a remarkable first of the famous tablets in Canaanite cuneiform. All number are familiarfrom other contemporary sources, or credit is due to the head of the archeological mission to from later literature. Since Ebla is situated well to the west Tell Mardikhfor his planning and persistence. It was only of the Euphrates river and was oriented in its trade after ten seasons of careful digging in the Middle Bronze toward the west and south, there is an impressive Age levels at Tell Mardikh that the Early Bronze Age correspondence with such place-names preserved in the strata were reached, and the great discovery was made. Bible as Hazor, Megiddo, Byblos, Sidon, Akko, Dor, Equal credit is due to the deciphererfor his extraordinary Ashdod, Gaza, and Jerusalem, which are mentioned in diligence in reading and transcribing the texts, and his texts reporting the shipment of goods (mainly textiles) remarkable willingness to share the results of his work, and the receipt of payment in money (gold and silver were even at preliminarystages, with his colleagues around the the preferred media of exchange) and kind (metals, world. grains, and animals are listed). Personal names also abound in the texts, and are While the decipherment, translation, and interpretation of these difficult texts pose many of practicallyevery type known in the Near East from that significant problems, preliminarystudy of the tablets has and other periods. Out of a large number, some are

It is safe to say that as recently as a year and a half ago, Ebla, the name of an ancient city in Northern Syria, was known only to a handful of people in the world, specialists in the arcane disciplines of Sumero-Akkadian languages and literature,and archeologists of the Bronze Age in the Near East. Now it has become a household word not only in the Near East where the discoveries were made, but in Europe and America and the Far East, in fact wherever newspapers and magazines are printed. What has happened in this brief span of time to catapult Tell Mardikh (the name of the modern village and the mound where Ebla once stood and lived) into the limelight? Beginning in the digging season of 1974, and continuing through last Fall, there has been a series of sensational finds of thousands and thousands of cuneiform tablets (perhaps20,000 in all so far, but with an excellent promise of many more to come), dating from approximately the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C.E. There is a debate between the excavator, Paolo Matthiae,

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MARCH1977

linguistically very similar to corresponding biblical names: in no case can it be shown that we are dealing with the same person, and in practically all cases the opposite can be demonstrated without doubt. Some of the names are: Abram, Israel, Ishmael, Michael, Micaiah, Esau, Saul, David. The spelling is given in the traditional form here; the spelling and pronunciation varied somewhat in the Ebla tablets, as they do in Biblical Hebrew, but the equivalence of the names is generally acknowledged. One of the most striking correspondences is between the name of the great king of Ebla, Ebrium, which is semantically and linguistically equivalent to the name Eber in Genesis 10:26 (and other places), who is one of the ancestors of Abram (= Abraham); the name Eber gives rise to the gentilic form Ibri (= Hebrew, the general term for Abraham and his descendants). The correlation is intriguing, although there is no evidence from the tablets linking the two persons or, to be sure, from the Bible. As already indicated, the archive consists mainly of economic texts, as is true of most of the great hoards uncovered in the past: collections of similar or greater magnitude have turned up at a number of cities, like Nippur (Old Babylonian) and Mari (Amorite), illuminating different and generally later periods of civilization in the Near East. What makes the Ebla collection especially valuable is that it is by far the largest for such an early date, and will shed much light on a very obscure era of human civilization (namely the rise of urban culture in the early centuries of the 3rd millennium). The hundreds of thousands of tablets already unearthed from many sites have proved a rich trove for economic and social historians of antiquity, and the new materials from Ebla should contribute their abundant share to such research. Already it is clear that the life of the city was built around its flourishing economy, that the administration both civil and religious was deeply involved in business activity, and that diplomacy and international politics were largely extensions of commercial relations. Clauses regulating trade and business are prominent in the preservedtreaties between Ebla and other city-states; the king and his princes were as much merchants as administrators or civil and religious leaders. The remaining tablets (perhaps 2,000 in number) belong to a variety of types and categories. These are more difficult to decipher and will requireintensive study before definitive information can be obtained. Nevertheless, a preliminary survey of their contents is possible, that is, of the relatively few that have been read and reported. Since these are palace documents (the great bulk of the tablets was found in a room in the great courtyard adjoining the palace), the king and the royal family naturally dominate much of the material. Thus there are royal edicts and correspondence with subordinates in the civil and military branches of government. There is diplomatic communication with foreign rulers(e.g., a plea for help from the king of Ebla to the king of Hamazi in Elam), and more than one treaty with other city-states, including Ashur (the capital of the later Assyrian kingdom), and Hama (a neighboring BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

kingdom about fifty miles south of Ebla). Among the texts are some dealing with the administration of the city, which was divided into two main districts:the acropolis or upper city, where the king and leading officials had their residence, and the lower city, which filled most of the territory of this enormous city (by ancient standards: the area within the massive earthen-rampart walls was 56 hectares, or about 140 acres). These in turn were divided into four quadrants, each with a local governor (in one period at least, that of Ebrium, all of the governors were royal princes). Other texts deal with the complex and elaborate rituals of worship, and give lists of the prescribed sacrifices, beginning with the royal family (the king comes first, then the crown prince, followed by the principal queen, and other princes). Other religious texts are mythological in nature, mentioning prominent gods of the Sumerian and West Semitic pantheons. The chief god of Ebla was Dagan, well known in different incarnations from the Bible and other sources from various places and periods (e.g., the story of Dagon, the chief god of the Philistine city of Ashdod, recorded in 1 Samuel 5). Texts dealing with the Creation story and the Flood have also been reported. Many of the non-economic documents are socalled school texts, which were prepared by students as part of their training. As was true universally, a large scribal school was associated with the palace, where apprentices were trained for years in the intricacies of the Sumerian writing system. Some tablets are exercises in which the student simply copied or reproduced from memory the signs (there are several thousand in the Sumerian sign-list) prepared by the master. The transition from student to master scribe was a long and tedious process and the tablets written by students show that progress was not always easy or unilinear. Such tablets were often graded and corrected (and criticized) by the teachers; it took a lot of practice to make perfect. But by and large, the tablets are elegantly written, and beautifully preserved. In the tablets so far read and reported, there are many references to contemporary events, and the kings and other participants in them. Some of these correlations are very important for the reconstruction of the chronology and history of the early 3rd millennium. One of the most significant is the appearance of the name of the king of Assur on the treaty between Assur and Ebla in the time of King Ebrium. In the heyday of the Assyrian empire (first half of the Ist millennium), great king-lists were prepared which traced the history of Assur back to its beginnings. The earliest kings were simply names, without regnal years or dynastic connections. The first seventeen are described as "kings who lived in tents," suggesting "a prehistoric period" to most scholars. Many of the earliest were regarded as legendary or imaginary ancestral figures (whose names symbolized later component groups in the kingdom). The first of these kings was named Tudiya, and about him nothing else was known. That happens to be the name of the king mentioned in the treaty (spelled Du-ud-i-ya at Ebla, but

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the equation is highly probable if not certain, since no distinction is made between d and t in the orthography). So it appears that the very first king of the Assyrian tradition has emerged from the mists of legend and dim memory onto the pages of history. We have an important synchronism, and when a firm date can be established for the dynasty of Ebla we will have one for the beginnings of the kingdom of Assur. Similar pleasant surprises are doubtless in store for historians as the contents of the tablets are made known. One extraordinary piece of information already has reached the public through an announcement at the general meeting of the Society of Biblical Literatureand the American Schools of Oriental Research in St. Louis on 29 October 1976, when Professors Matthiae and Pettinato spoke to a huge gathering at the Stouffer Riverfront Towers Hotel (thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the University of Michigan for this purpose). It was revealed that on one tablet listing many cities with which Ebla had commercial relations, the five Cities of the Plain appear in precisely the same order as in the Book of Genesis, 14:2 and 8. These cities are well known to tradition, especially the first two: Sodom and Gomorrah; the others are Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela (which is also called Zoar). According to biblical tradition, these cities were flourishing at the time that Abraham and his nephew Lot came to the Holy Land, and settled there. In fact, Lot, given a choice, selected Sodom as his permanent home (see chaps. 12-19 of the Book of Genesis for the story). The outcome is well known: Lot barely escaped with his life and immediate family when the cities were destroyed in a violent catastrophe, understood by the biblical writers to be an act of divine retribution for the misbehavior of the inhabitants, especially of Sodom and Gomorrah. While the cities lived on in tradition as outstanding examples of the consequences of wickedness, no trace of any of them has ever been found, and until the discoveries at Ebla no mention of them has been noted in any source of early times outside of the Bible. Now for the first time they are listed in an ordinary economic tablet from Ebla, and it is clear that this is the period when the Cities of the Plain were flourishing emporia, like Ebla itself. Behind the tradition in the Bible about those cities there is now established fact. During the period of Ebla's prosperity, these cities also flourished, and were active trading partners of the colossus to the north. The narrative in Genesis describes the somewhat later situation, when the cities were subject to the authority of the kings of the east, rebelled, weredefeated, and were subsequently destroyed. Just when these later events occurred is not altogether clear, but there is collateral evidence to indicate that it was not very long after the period reflected in the Ebla tablets, that is, in the 3rd millennium B.C.E.and perhaps as early as the end of Early Bronze Age III (about 2400). In turn this would indicate a date in the middle of the 3rd millennium for Abraham, much earlier than previous views on the subject. Further speculation should be held

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in abeyance until a great deal more information is available from the tablets. In the meantime, it is enough to be astounded and expectant. Ebla, having been discovered as an important newsmaker from the ancient past, is not likely to be lost again in the foreseeable future. There is every reason to believe that there will be a constant stream of sensational data from that site and from its tablets, as the latter are deciphered and published. So far the truth has outstripped the rumors, and the facts are more impressive than the speculations. An almost blank chapter in the history of Syria-Palestine is being filled in rapidly, and a significant stimulus has been given to man's study of his past. The picture of Ebla with its elaborate hierarchical administration, and apparently bloated bureaucracy (11,000 civil servants at the palace in a population of 260,000), not to speak of an academic elite, may remind us uncomfortably of many of our own problems, but at least we can take consolation from the fact that they are not new, and that mankind, if it has not coped with them successfuly, at least has survived. The discoveries at Ebla have already stirred up enough controversy and conflict in the scholarly world to fill the journals with debates over the date of the tablets, and the classification of the Semitic languages, among other matters, for the balance of the century. Whetherthe tablets belong to Early Bronze Age II (or III: from 2800 to 2500 B.C.E.) or Early Bronze Age IV A (2400 to 2250 B.C.E.), or whether the language of Ebla is to be classified as Northwest Semitic or East Semitic may be of interest only to antiquarian specialists, but the possible connection between the Ebla tablets and the biblical traditions bids fair to reignite the simmering battle between conservatives and liberals over the historical accuracy of the biblical narratives. The uncanny correspondence between the names of the five Cities of the Plain in the Bible and on Tablet No. 1860 from Ebla (actually there is a sixth correlation, since the alternate name of Bela given in Genesis 14:2 is Zoar; the equivalent name is given in another Ebla tablet with the specificaton that it belongs to the district or territory of Bela) suggests not only that the former rests on a firm historical substratum, but that some of the patriarchal traditions go back to events and circumstances of the 3rd millennium B.C.E., a very long

stretch in anyone's chronology (the most popular date for the patriarchs even among conservatives has been the Middle Bronze Age, during the first half of the 2nd millennium, and some have pushed the dates down into the Late Bronze Age, during the third quarter of that millennium). This is particularly mind-boggling if we think in terms of the oral transmission of these reminiscences over such a long period. Right now, the most attractive date for Abraham offered by scholars (though on the low side) is that of the "hyper-modern" exegete and biblical commentator, Archbishop James Ussher (1581- 1656), whose chronology was found in most editions of the King James Bible, and whose date for the creation of the world is the well-known 4004 B.c.

MARCH1977

NEWS FROM THE FIELD

The Animal Kingdom A rare species of karakul sheep that used to roam in freely biblical Israel is being restoredto the land. Three pregnant ewes and a ram have been shipped from Pennsylvania to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. The snake, however, continues his resident rounds. The magazine Land and Nature offers a brief rundown on six venomous types known to the Negev and Sinai: the black desert cobra, which feeds on green toads but apparently seeks human company; the En-gedi mole viper, which is thin and black and deceptively phlegmatic; the carpet viper, which camouflages itself so successfully that it is virtually indistinguishable from its surroundings (but it is a diligent biter, moves rapidly, and strikes speedily); Field's horned viper, with tiny horns above its eyes and brown stripes on its yellow body; the sand viper, which dwells in and takes its color from the sand, has heavy scales and a wide flat head; and the pigmy sand viper, yellow to orange in color, with two rows of brown spots down its back, rough scales, and a blunt, heartshaped head. Rule of thumb: non-poisonous= shiny, colored; poisonous =colored, rough-scaled, ridged on the back scales, or, if black, less than 1.20 m. long. No longer poisonous, if indeed it ever was, but a fitting addendum to ophidian lore, is the news of the discovery in the Jerusalem hills of an 80- to 100-millionyear-old fossil snake. A marine variety, it is the first ever to be found in Israel, is rare throughout the world, and is notable besides for its excellently preservedskull. Its body is not so well preserved,apparently, since its length--1.52 m. -can only be estimated. Lost and Found The lower part of a funerary altar, whose Latin inscription bears the name of XIIth Legion officer Julius Magnus, turned up in Caesarea in 1947 and was taken to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Almost exactly thirty years later the upper part was discovered in the Caesarea Museum and shipped to the Rockefeller to join its better (or bottom) half. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

Kibbutz Tirat Zvi in the Beth-shean Valley is proving a repository of Roman remains:two years ago a tourist with a mine detector stumbled on a rare bronze head of Hadrian, the emperor who laid Jerusalem waste in the 2nd century C.E. The other day two miles from where the head had lain a Latin inscription to Hadrian was found. It is 6 m. long and 1.20 m. high and may have been part of a triumphal arch erected when the emperor visited this outpost of the empire. Appropriately, the inscription was found under the ancient Roman road from Beth-shean to Jericho, not far from a recently uncovered Roman Legion camp. The peripatetic Romans have surfaced again, this time in northern France, thanks to the worst drought in a hundred years. Last summer turned that area into a virtual desert, permitting archeologists in small planes to distinguish in the desiccated croplands patterns of ancient settlement never observed before. Like heat on invisible ink, the drought brought to light traces of huge ancient farms, often with buildings more than 400 feet long. Julius Caesar called them aedificiae, and the remains recently photographed reveal that 2,000 years ago agriculture was big business. These great complexes completely reverse the traditional view that northern Gaul was simply a vast woods dotted with occasional villages. In an area 16 miles long and 12 miles wide, 31 Roman estates are visible, but not a single town. There was also an outdoor theater some distance away, half the size of a football stadium, evidence perhapsof an abortive effort to establish a town, or simply an entertainment center for the wealthy burghers. All the estates conformed with Roman building precepts and were equipped with lavish baths and central heating, altogether more luxurious than the chateaux of the French nobility in the 17th and 18th centuries of our era. They were clearly agricultural centers built to exploit the riches of the conquered country. Taanach Workshop Under the direction of Prof. Albert Glock, the Taanach Workshop at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem continues its fieldwork in ceramic ethnography. In order to determine the techniques of the Taanach potters, Dr. Owen Rye has been investigating the current methods of local male potters and Dr. John Landgrafthose of women potters. Dr. Rye, a ceramic technologist working on Taanach pottery from the Bronze Age, returned to Jerusalem in March from Australia and Pakistan. .The Interdisciplinary Archeological Seminar, another project of the Taanach Workshop, has had several guests since its inception last fall. Profs. Robert Maddin and Tamara Wheeler of the University of Pennsylvania and Prof. Emeritus Rachel MaxwellHyslop of the Institute of Archaeology, London, came together to analyze the metallurgical process employed in the Taanach artifacts. Dr. Patricia Smith discussed osteology and Prof. Y. Karmon the contributions of geographical research to archeology.

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Jottings from Jordan In 1955, bulldozers at the Amman Airport uncovered a mysterious square building crammed with Late Bronze artifacts. Eleven years later the entire structurewas excavated, disclosing human bones, which strengthened the theory of Basil Hennessy, the dig's director, that the building had been a temple where child sacrifice was practiced. So far from accepted was his opinion, however, that in 1976, when the subject of conserving the so-called temple site came up, further excavation seemed indicated. Under the supervision of Larry Herr, a 10-day salvage dig was conducted, ending on Aug. 27, and yielding a few interesting facts: The plentiful artifacts found in 1955 existed only in the immediate vicinity of the building, suggesting that there had been no settlement nearby;two parallel rows of small rocks, many charred, were separated by a 3x3 m. space, just about the size of an altar;of the many bone fragments collected, 95% were human and all showed signs of burning, although the animal fragments bore no such evidence. The excavators returned to Hennessy's theory of a cult place for child sacrifice. Analysis, however, scotched that one: these were adult, not children's bones. The new interpretation, logical in view of the Late Bronze settlement that had recently been unearthed at Amman, was that this was a mortuary complex, set apart because cremation and burial took place there. Thus the stone piles might have been the pyre, the nearby building the ceremonial center and possibly the repository for valuable tomb furnishings. The round stone in the middle of the structure, rather than an altar as Hennessy suggested, might have been an incense stand, a stronger possibility, since evidence of burning was slight. Whatever its original function, the building is now being restored, and its ancient artifacts will be on display in the airport lounge. The far more ambitious excavation at Tell Hesban, 16 miles southwest of Amman, ended its fifth season on Aug. 11, with most of its goals achieved. The earliest stratum dates to Iron I (ca. 1200-1000 B.C.E.)and yielded many sherds, ceramic loom-weights, and an uninscribedseal. In the Iron II-Persianperiod stratum the largest reservoir (datable to that time) on Jordan's east bank was cleared, possibly to be identified, if Hesbin is biblical Heshbon, with the "pools by the gate of Bathrabbim" (Cant 7:4; 7:5 in the Hebrew). There are two Hellenistic strata, the later associated with the Maccabees; among other reported finds was a perfectly preserved Hellenistic lamp. Of the finds from the Early Roman period the most impressive architecturallywas the almost 20 feet of stone tower, part of the foundation of which penetrated the Iron Age fill to reach bedrock. From the Late Roman period an imposing stairway was unearthed,which undoubtedly leads toward an important public structure at the summit of the acropolis. This may have been the temple appearing on the Elagabalus coin, of which two examples have been found at Hesban. With the Early Byzantineperiod discoveries began to proliferate, among them an ivory plaque depicting

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Prometheus Bound and a four-spouted lamp. Space limits a further account of the multiplicity of objects, buildings, walls, and pavements, but the January 1977 (No. 8) Newsletter is devoted in its entirety to a full illustrated description both of findings and conclusions. On Papyrus, On Clay Recent information about documents in ancient Hebrew includes the imminent publication of the socalled Temple Scroll, the latest of the Dead Sea cache. Yigael Yadin and his team, with the help of infrared and reverse photography, have finally deciphered it and report that it examines Essene Halakah and uses ordinary script to record the name of God instead of the distinctive variety usually employed. This further suggests that the Temple Scroll represents a direct divine revelation. The 12th-century B.C.E. tablet from Isbet Sarte, reported here in September, was not only a miraculous discovery but a miraculous recovery. Aaron Demsky, who, with Moshe Kochavi, is about to publish the findings, says that while one of the excavators, Arieh Bornstein, was peering into a storage pit in the tell he noticed a sherd on which there seemed to be writing. He pointed out the faint traces to others, but no one believed him. Bornstein was undeterred, retrieved the sherd anyway, and took it to Kochavi, the dig's director. Whatever was incised on the sherd was so fine and so indistinct that Kochavi himself could not be sure whether he was looking at scratches or writing. He conceived the idea of getting some American volunteers at the tell, who knew not one letter of Hebrew or any other Semitic language, to copy what they saw; incredibly they produced an early Hebrew or Canaanite alphabet. Now that the sherd has been cleaned the alphabet is easy to perceive, but as for the rest of the writing (there are five lines or columns in all), neither the excavators nor the epigraphers are sure at this time whether there is a message on the tablet or whether it was used by a longago student for practicing his hand at the different characters. In any case, it is an important link in the history of alphabetic writing and ranks among the oldest Hebrew inscriptions. Marine Museum At 200 Rehov Allenby, appropriately situated in the port city of Haifa, is the National Maritime Museum, which traces the development of seagoing transportation in the Mediterranean. On display are models of sailing and oared ships, sea charts, ancient drawings of ports and oceans, antique navigational aids, and maritime-related archeological finds. Reliefs, tomb paintings, and other ancient art provided the data for the detailed reconstructions of the vessels. Models include a fast-moving Greek ship in use around 500 B.c., which had room for 60 or more longoarsmen on deck and the same number of short-oarsmen below; a Ist-century B.C.Judean warship;a Roman grain ship bound from Alexandria to Ostia; a 2nd-century A.D.

MARCH1977

Sidonian merchantman; Crusader ships, Viking ships, and models of the Israeli fleet. The well-lighted and clearly-labeled artifacts vividly conjure up a maritime world long past: at either end of the ship, an ankh, the symbol of life, and an eye protect an Old Kingdom Egyptian vessel of 2500 B.c.; a sedan chair provides transport for a soul on an Egyptian funerary ship of 2000 B.c.; duck heads ornament the ends of a Philistine ship of 1200 B.c.; and a Phoenician "Hippos"vessel of the 8th century B.C.sports the carved head of a horse and the tail of a fish. Among the charts are maps from historical periods down to modern times, including the first Hebrew

map of the Holy Land, by Abraham bar Yaacov, Amsterdam, 1697; a "Map of the Worldly and Heavenly Nile," from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, XIX; the world according to Homer and to the geographer Hecateus of Miletus at the time of Herodotus, ca. 500 B.C., and a map from the time of Eratosthenes of Alexandria, 200 B.c. One of the regular monthly displays was devoted to pottery vessels, anchors, coins, figurines, jewelry, and other objects recoveredby underwaterarcheologists from nearby coastal waters. Copies of a number of the artifacts are among the items on sale at the museum's souvenir shop.

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AIA REPORT

The 78th general meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, held in New York City, December 28-30, 1976, attracted some 2,000 members, a 10% increase over the attendance in 1975 and 20%over that in 1974. This record attendance may be due in part to the lure of the Big Apple, particularly during the Christmas season, but largely to the program's two outstanding events: Paolo Matthiae's lecture at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Christos Doumas' presentation after the banquet at the Waldorf Astoria. Professor Matthiae, director of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Syria and excavator of Tell Mardikh, drew about 800 afficionados to his illustrated exposition of "The Royal Palace and State Archives of Ebla: New Light on the Ancient Near East in the Third Millennium." In the excitement over the epigraphical finds at Ebla, the other archeological discoveries had received scant attention; to these Professor Matthiae devoted his paper. The excavations uncovered the remains of a large courtyard enclosed only by a north and an east facade, the south and west sides having been eroded with the slope of the tell. The walls were constructed of mud brick over stone foundations. At the juncture of these two walls is a large tower housing a magnificent ceremonial stairway with four ramps. Wooden planks, inlaid with limestone and shell, of which only impressions remain, decorated the steps. Under the north portico of the courtyard is a podium of unbaked bricks covered with white plaster, thought to have been a platform for the king and the reason for calling the area the "audiencecourt." Along the east wall of the court are three rooms under a portico, in two of which 15,000 tablets were discovered in 1975. The audience court is outside the actual palace confines, only a small portion of which has been excavated so far. The palace has been dated to the period from 2400 to 2250 B.c., the time of its final destruction, which is attributed to Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon the Great. Among the numerous slides shown were pieces of "painted simple ware," goblets, small jars, beautifully painted juglets with braid motives, and cooking pots. Of

8

particular interest were the burned-wood carvings, the remains of side panel decorations of a table, a chair, the cylinder seal impressions, and parts of figures in various materials. Among the animal and human figures in beautifullycarved openwork were a bearded man wearing a flounced mantle and a curious turban and holding an axe, lions fighting bulls, and warriors in battle with swords. A bull with the head of a bearded man was worked entirely in beaten gold over wood. Professor Matthiae stressed the artistic and chronological implications of the cylinder seal impressions on clay bullae, three of which bear the names of their owners, high officials in the reign of the last king of Ebla. There are seals with bull-men and bulls, a nude hero with a lion's head, raising an inverted lion by the hind legs, a female figure with goat horns, and a kneeling atlantid figure with a guilloche belt, his hands lifted to a circulardesign of two lion and two human heads. The discovery of several sheets of gold confirmed the assumption of the original richness of the small finds. Ebla clearly dominated the AIA meeting, and Professor Matthiae's lecture was summarized the next day on the front page of the New York Times. Pursuing the implications of the discovery of ancient Ebla, Dr. William Dever pointed out that with the destruction of the urban center of ancient Ebla in Syria, ca. 2300 B.C., new settlements appeared on the upper Euphrates, characterized by EB IV-MB I pottery, while farther south in Palestine a complete disruption of town life seems to have taken place, with a wide distribution of open village-sites on the fringes of the country, particularly in southern Transjordan and in the NegevSinai. Dever suggested that these marginal settlements might be connected with semi-nomadic pastoralists from Syria, possibly the Amorites known from Mesopotamian texts, ca. 2300-1700 B.C. The choice of Professor Christos Doumas as speaker after the banquet was felicitous. The high quality of his presentation, "Works and Days in Bronze Age Greece," amply compensated for the low quality of the exorbitantly priced dinner. Professor Doumas, successor to the late Professor Marinatos as director of excavations at Thera, intends to limit further excavation in order to concentrate on the analysis, classification, and evaluation of the numerous buildings and vast quantity of material already uncovered but stored away without critical assessment or interpretation. In his opinion, the excavations at Acrotiri have already been so widely extended that no purpose is served by further digging until the finds already amassed are thoroughly studied. His beautiful slides might tempt more than one viewer to the island of Santorini. A valuable innovation at the meeting was a section on "Science in Archeology," which was well attended even though highly technical and should certainly become a permanent feature of future programs. Most of the papers concerned dating methods: amino-acid dating by racimization, which can be applied to bone matter of any age but is most useful with materials less than two million years old; the Uranium Series Disequilibrium Dating of MARCH

1977

Travertinesused with stalagmite crusts in limestone caves or with tufas on the sites of former springs, where these materials are embedded in or interstratified with travertine. Paleoclimatic evidence was also proposed as a necessary means for dating paleolithic finds. Correct use of climatostratigraphicevidence should differentiate the effects of major glaciations from local weather anomalies. Finally, paleomagnetism, a new geophysical method for acquiring the record of paleomagnetic events, is being adapted for archeological dating. Reports were made on underground radar and underwater sonar, two new methods for locating buried structures or other intrusive material in archeological prospecting. The inventor of the modern strobe, Dr. Harold E. Edgerton of M.I.T., brought sonar to underwater archeology by means of a scanning system that penetrates 1,000 m. or so under the sea to reach targets that warrant excavating and recording. Aerial archeological photography, of increasing interest (see BA query vol. 39, no. 1), was discussed, one paper dealing with low-altitude, the other with highaltitude photography. J. Wilson Myers of Michigan State University reported on the usefulness of low-altitude shots for archeological exploration, recording, mapping, and interpretation.A tetheredhydrogen balloon, a radiocontrolled automatic camera, and a sensitive gimbal to hold the camera in a true vertical position recorded details invisible from a standardaerial mapping plan. The system was used in 1976at altitudes ranging from 800 m., to show a Minoan palace and outlying excavations, to 8 m., to show a section of Roman mosaic floor. John H. Quann of the Goddard Space Flight Center emphasized the promise of high-altitude photography and suggested that the NASA Space Program be applied to archeology, citing the synoptic view of the Nacza lines in the desert between Nacza and Palpa in southern Peru exposing unexplained vestiges of an ancient culture. An overview of the kind best obtained at altitudes which can only be achieved by spacecraft has been recorded by scanners flown on board Landsat from a height of almost 600 miles. Of special interest to readers of this journal are papers dealing with the Near East and expeditions sponsored by ASOR. An afternoon session under the able chairmanship of Dr. Javier Teixidor was devoted to reports about the relatively new excavations at Carthage, Tunisia, funded by the Smithsonian Institute and sponsored by ASOR and the Kelsey Museum. Lawrence E. Stager, director of the Punic Project, reported on the "Tophet,"the burialground for infants sacrificed to Tanit and Baal-Hammon, where sandstone and limestone stelae and 35 jar-burials were discovered. The 5th-4thcentury B.C.jars, partly contemporary with the Punic port 30 m. to the east, contained children, most of whom were one or two years old when they were cremated;their position suggests that they had been drugged or killed beforehand. Necklaces and precious beads were interred with them. Dr. Stager's theory that the port, i.e., the merchant harbor, was built close to the Tophet so that BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

monuments could be transported directly to its back entrance is supported by the recovery of a huge monument of the type used in the 4th-century B.C. Tophet. It had been brought by boat or barge from the Cap Bon peninsula, and the wooden beams from the craft were still pinned under the sunken monument. Reuben Bullardpointed out the unique geological environment of ancient Carthage. Phoenician colonists exploited the favorable harbor conditions and settled on the promontories of the eastern extremities of the Atlas mountains. Ground and sea levels were lower than they are today, and Tophet burials were in near-marsh soils. The Romans later raised the ground level with fill. Like the Punic colonists, the Romans brought coarse lithified sand from Cap Bon for their buildings and funeral stelae, but they also exploited the hills and mountains surrounding the Bay of Tunis for building materials. For decorative lithics the Romans ranged from Numidia to Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Since hostilities on Cyprus had interrupted the 1974 season and work could not be resumed in 1975, renewed archeological activity was eagerly anticipated in 1976. The sixth season of investigation in the Dhali region, under the direction of Anita Walker, concentrated on the Neolithic site of Dhali Agridhi, the central lower city of Idalion proper, and the medieval site of Teredhia near Lythradona. Dr. Walker found evidence of a much larger site at Dhali Agridhi than had been supposed, with at least semi-permanent occupation. Salvage operations were undertaken since erosion threatens the Neolithic deposits. Yechiel M. Lehavy has as yet found no dwelling areas in the Neolithic Dhali Agridhi excavations but has uncovered workshops and garbage dumps. The numerous stone bowl fragments, bone tools, and stone hammers suggest a settlement rather than a hunting station. New excavations began at two sites on Cyprus in 1976, the first, directed by lan A. Todd and sponsored by Brandeis University, at Neolithic Kalavasos-Tenta in the Larnaca province, the second, directed by John E. Coleman and sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Program in Archeology of Cornell University, at Alambra. The Kalavasos-Tenta campaign yielded stone vessels but no prehistoric pottery. Excavations by Dr. Dikaios in 1974 indicated that stone architectureexisted on the lower part of the site, and in 1976 circular stone structureswere found at the top, where double concentric walls parallel the architecture of Khirokitia. Finds from Alambra fill a gap of over 1500 years in our knowledge of domestic architecture in Cyprus. They are particularly important for Cypriot chronology, which for the early Cypriot and the beginning of the Middle Cypriot period has been based exclusively on tombs. Buildings were quite large and complex, one having at least five rooms. They are founded on bedrock, their lower surfaces often faced with a clay plaster and supporting a superstructure of mud brick. Among the contents of the rooms were copper pins, stone household implements, and quantities of pottery.

9

James R. Carpenter continues to excavate at the Bronze Age site of Phaneromeni Episkopi, where additional remains of walls of private houses, ca. 16001500 B.c., were uncovered. There is evidence that at least one house had a second story and that the settlement was destroyed by fire. In the occupation debris within the settlement were pottery, terra-cotta objects, stone jewelry, and stone and bronze implements. The site provides crucial new information about ceramic sequences and domestic architecture of the Cypriot Bronze Age. A welcome break in the excavation reports from Cyprus was Stuart Swiny's paper on Cypriot gambling stones, which closely resemble stones from Byblos and Hama J, and, in bone, those from Iron Age levels at Tell Farah and Lachish. These objects have been variously explained as games or calendars but may have been connected with religious practices. A late Cypriot IA I settlement at Phaneromeni Episkopi produced two river stones with three parallel rows of ten shallow holes each and one or two deeper depressions to one side. Rudolph H. Dornemann described outstanding Late Bronze finds at Tell Hadidi in Syria, consisting of mostly complete and other fragmentary clay tablets inscribed with Akkadian cuneiform, whose texts were economic and judicial. From Israel, Anson Rainey

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summarizedthe importance and stratigraphicposition of the finds of the 1976 season at Tell Beer-sheba, where Z. Herzog has succeeded the late Dr. Y. Aharoni as director. Stratum VII brought forth an I Ith-century B.C.casemate fortress, its gate, towers, and rooms; Stratum VI-A, a late I Ith-early 10th-century B.C. unfortified village, with mainly three-room houses and their contents; and Stratum II, an 8th-century B.C.building next to the city gate. The remaining stones, with burn marks, of the horned sacrificialaltar found in 1973(see BA illustration, vol. 39, no. 2) were unearthed. Reports on excavations not within the range of this journal will undoubtedly appear in other publications, covering the sessions devoted to Turkey (notably Sardis and Aphrodisias), Crete, Athens, Rome, and Stobi, Yugoslavia. Of interest to all is the presentation of the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement to Lucy Shoe Meritt, whose innovative work on moldings in Greek architecture has contributed significantlyto our understandingof ancient architecture. She joins the ranks of such other distinguished award winners as Gisella Richter in classical and W. F. Albright in Near Eastern studies.

LOTTAMOREAUGASTER

NEW FROMSCHOLARSPRESS FOR THE SOCIETYOF BIBLICALLITERATURE DISSERTATIONSERIES#39 Luke T. Johnson

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The LiteraryFunctionof Possession in Luke-Acts ISBN 0-89130-200-X

10

MARCH1977

ALONG

JERUSALEM'S WALLS MAGEN BROSHI

From 1973 to 1976, the Mount Zion Archeological Expedition conducted a series of excavations along the western and southern walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, extending some 700 meters (roughly 1/6 of the perimeter) from the southern moat of the Citadel-the so-called David's Tower-to the vicinity of Burj Kabrit. Significant phases in the history of the city's defenses emerged, includingpart of the Hasmonean wall and the line of Herod'sfortifications on the western slope, and a medieval gate-tower on the southern slope. 1 The Hasmonean Wall Known as the "First Wall," a long, continuous segment (about 120m.) of the most ancient wall along this line was uncovered south of the Citadel. Its inner face had been discovered earlier during the Armenian Garden Expedition (Jerusalem Revealed, pp. 55-56); now considerable fragments of its outer face were exposed. It was built along an excellent topographical course, at the top of the slope rising steeply from the bed of the Hinnom Valley. Because this slope, prior to construction of the wall, had been a quarry (and probably the source of the stones used in the wall), the difficulty of ascent was increased. The advantages of the line were recognized and exploited by all subsequent fortifiers on this flank of the city, from the Hasmoneans (ca. 100 B.C.)to the Ottoman Turks (1536-1541). Besides its topographical advantages, Magen Broshi is Curator of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

later builders had the turther benefit of using the earlier ruins as foundations for their own walls. The Turkish wall is built directly over the surviving courses of the Hasmonean wall, which is founded on bedrock. Only a part of the older wall's width of 5.4 meters was utilized for the Turkish wall. The Hasmonean wall, constructed of ashlars with bosses and margins, is occasionally laid as headers and stretchers;the stone used is the relativelysoft local meleke limestone, whereas the Turkish wall is of harder material, mainly the local mizzi hilu limestone. This section of the Hasmonean wall seems to have been repaired when necessary and to have served as the city wall until the Middle Ages. 1 Four towers tangential to the wall are indicative of its history. One had been erected earlier than the wall itself; the second is contemporaneous with it; the two

11

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E3 Fig. 1. Partof the westerncity-wallsouth of the citadel. Legend: Black = The HasmoneanWall Shaded = The Herodianoutertrace others were added later. The earliest may have been an isolated watch-tower, of the Hellenistic type excavated at Giv'at Shaul. Among its ruins, which had been incorporated in a medieval tower that later became part of the Turkish wall, we found the remains of a gate: a jamb, a sill, and a later walling-up. Visible in the picture

A gate, discovered among the ruins of the early wall, was obscured by later building. are the joints of the early entrance, and the way the Hasmonean wall approaches it and overlies the bossed ashlars of the threshold and jamb. The tower is apparently from the 2nd century B.C., at the time of Antiochus IV or of one of the early Hasmoneans. Several segments of the "First Wall" were uncovered during the last century of excavations by Modsley, Bliss, and Dickey on the Mt. Zion slope; by Johns, Amiran, and Eitan at the Citadel; and by Kenyon at the Ophel. To these we can now add our own discoveries. Recently Avigad also found a small segment of the northern course of the "First Wall," a discovery of the utmost significance, for until now the northerncourse was the only entirely unknown flank. The three flanks on the edge or outside of the present Old City could be revealed in part, but this northern course, lying entirely within the built-up area, was inaccessible until a few years ago. Because built-up areas are all but impossible to

12

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= The TurkishWall, the Hasmoneancourses beneathit unmarked.

excavate, we have information about only two of the three city walls of the Second Temple period: the "First" and "Third,"located, the one in its entirety and the other in large part, beyond the walls of the present Old City. The "Second Wall,"however, must lie entirely within the confines of the northern part of the Old City, since essentially nothing of its course has been identified with certainty. The Herodian Outer Rampart Beyond the line of the Hasmonean wall, another was found, intact to a height only slightly above the base of the earlierwall to the east. Parts of it are built of ashlars with bosses and margins, in Hasmonean fashion, and others of larger stones of rougher dressing. The upper courses of these latter had been plastered. Nothing is known of the original height of this outer wall, which may initially have risen as high as the inner one and may have been intended to strengthen the Hasmonean wall, forming a massive barrier 8 m. thick. If so, it must be assumed that the upper courses were subsequently removed. It may, on the other hand, have risen only high enough to cover the foundations of the wall behind it, thus shielding the base of that wall from sapping. This is known in military parlance as a built scarp or vertical revetment. Such thickening can be considered an adaptation of an element quite common in Hellenistic military engineering, known as proteichisma in Greek and agger in Latin. Walls like these were usually built some distance away from the main wall (from 1.6-10 m., but generally about 3.5-4.5 m.), but here the steep slope must have influenced the builders. No other such MARCH

1977

revetment is known in this country, although Josephus mentions an outer wall at the Antonia fortress in Jerusalem (J. W. 5.5.8): "And before you come to the edifice of the tower [of Antonia] itself, there was a wall three cubits high; but within that wall all the space of the tower of Antonia itself was built upon, to the height of forty cubits." The outer rampart in our excavations, as preserved,and possibly as originally built, varies in height from place to place to conform with the bedrock, but its average height differs little from the figure given by Josephus: three cubits, or about 1.5 m. Since this wall was built over a tower of the Hasmonean wall (another tower, therefore, having been built in its stead), it is clearly subsequent to the earlier wall. The fill packed against it is of the Herodian period and it can be assumed to have been built under Herod. It was erected along the western edge of the palace as an additional source of strength and beauty for a structure renowned for both. To support the palace and to level off the area, a huge earthen terrace had been built, parts of which have been found within the Citadel and in the Armenian Garden. The present wall, added by Herod,

may also have had the strucural function of buttressing the Hasmonean wall against the added pressureof the fill beneath the palace. The Ayyubid Gate-Tower Some 100 m. east of Zion Gate, where the Jewish Quarter Development Corporation is planning a tunnel beneath the city wall to provide road access to a subterraneancar-parkwithin the Old City, the expedition excavated a trial trench, in which a medieval gate-tower was found. A monumental Arabic inscription, assumed to have been affixed over the gate, unequivocally reveals the history of the structure. The tower was built in A.D. 1212 by 'al-Malik al-Mucazzam, the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus and nephew of Saladin. From other historical sources we know that in 1219, seven years after he had rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, the sultan had them dismantled. This destruction, part of a "scorched earth" policy, was to prevent possession by invading Crusaders of a well-fortified city which the sultan had no means of garrisoning effectively.

Fig. 2. Reconstructionof the AyyubidGate.

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BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

13

A Muslim historian writes: "When the Crusader siege on the port of Damietta tightened, and it was about to surrender, al-Malik al-Mucazzam sharf al-Din :Isa b. al-Malik al- Adil, ruler of Damascus, feared lest great Frank forces arrive by sea upon hearing of the strength of

The Moslems were determined that the Crusadersshould not possess a fortified Jerusalem, and Jerusalem's walls lay shattered. their comrades and of their success within Egypt;and that al-Malik al-Kamil was engaged by the war against the Franks within Egypt; that then they would turn toward Jerusalem (for it was now fortified), and that they would gain control over it and he would not be able later to wrest it from their hands. Then he (Dal-Malik al-Mucazzam) began to dismantle the towers of Jerusalem and its walls which were of the mightiest and most powerful. And Jerusalem, since it had been wrested from the Franks by

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14

al-Malik al-Nasr Salah al-Din [Saladin], stood built, and every one of its towers was planned as a fortress. And he gathered the masons and sappers and undermined the walls and its towers, and destroyed them -except David's Tower, which he left. And when the walls were destroyed, most of the inhabitants left, for there had lived within [the city] an innumerable population and now but a few people remained. After these events, 'al-Malik alMucazzam began to transfer the armories and weapons, and the like, and its [Jerusalem's]destruction was a hard blow to the Muslims and they sorrowed greatly" (Ibn Wasl, Mufarij el-Kurub IV, 32). In the year 1229 the undefended city did in fact fall into the hands of Frederick II, from which time the walls of Jerusalem lay in ruins until the Turkish Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (the "Lawgiver")rebuilt them some 320 years later. Several Muslim rulers had previously suggested rebuilding the defenses of the city, but none had done so. Numerous Jewish, Christian, and Muslim accounts tell of the undefended state of the city during these centuries; in the words of Obadiah of Bertinoro (1488 A.D.): "The greater part of Jerusalem is destroyed and desolated, not to mention that it has no walls." The tower, two corners of which have been exposed, appears to have been 23 m. long (or about 50 cubits); most of it lies beneath the present-day wall, so that only excavations within the walls can uncover it completely. The destruction of the tower and the gate was almost total; surrounding it we found the stones as they had fallen: jambs, voussoirs, and lintels, as well as the inscription, most of them in good enough condition to make reconstruction possible. The remains were discovered opposite the Jew's Street; in other words, at

Two inscriptions in excellent condition spell out the story and assure the chronology. the end of the longitudinal artery of the city, successor to the Roman Cardo, running south from the Damascus Gate. Future excavators may find remains of still earlier gates on this site. Of the various suggestions as to its name, I favor that of M. Sharon and I. Tsafrir,who think it was the Nea Gate, so called after the great church, a small part of which was recently uncovered by N. Avigad and whose entrance stood some 120 m. northeast of the gate. The Arab geographer al-Muqadasi (A.D. 985), writing about the city gates of his time, mentions that beyond the Zion Gate stood the et-Tih Gate, allegedly named after the wilderness of the southern Negeb and northern Sinai; in this context and this location, however, such a name would be utterly meaningless. Clermont-Ganneau seems therefore to have assumed correctly that the real name had been misspelled ("t"for "n"is a common slip of the pen in Arabic) and that it is in fact the el-Nea ("New

MARCH 1977

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BIBLICALARCHEOLOGIST

15

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16

MARCH 1977

Church")Gate, mentioned by Yaqut in his book Mu jam al-Buldan (A.D. 1225). The 2.7 m. long inscription, carved in relief, was in three fragments, the first discovered by chance some years ago, the other two in the course of our excavations. The inscription has been above-ground for only seven years and is therefore excellently preserved, retaining evidence of the red-painted background for the text itself. Inscribed are the date, and the names of the ruler, the governor, and the architect-overseer. The importance of the actual discovery is enhanced by the clues it provides for dating the structures above and beneath. A year after we found the inscription, we came its older counterpart on a mound of ashlars on the upon western slope. It dates from 1202 and is almost identical with the first in form and text. This pile of stones offers

further evidence of the scorched earth policy carried out by Dal-Malik al-Mucazzam, described by contemporary writers and confirmed by our own finds.

NOTE

'The expedition was headed by the author, assisted by Nahman Gershon and Elliot Brown. Yishai (Scott) Eldar and Simon Gibson were our surveyors, and Yehudit Sasson classified our findings. As in prior seasons, our team's consultants were architect Ehud Netzer and Mrs. Yael Israeli. The excavations were sponsored by the Division of Antiquities and Museums, with the support of the Kress Foundations and the Jerusalem Foundation (along the western slope) and the Corporation for the Rehabilitation and Development of the Jewish Quarter (the gate-tower on the southern slope).

JOSEPHUS The time has come for a brief biography of Josephus, who appears regularly in the BA, between parentheses, as Jos. J. W., Jos. Ant., Jos. Life, and Jos. Ag.Ap. Born Joseph ben Matthias, he is called Flavius Josephus, the Flavius a later embellishment, taken in deference to his patron and savior, the emperor Vespasian, whose family name it was. Josephus was born, probably in Jerusalem, in the first year of Caligula (37-38 C.E.).Through his father he was descended from a noble family of priestly Jews and through his mother from the Hasmonean high priest Jonathan. By the time he was 19 he had studied the three principal Jewish sects -Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes-and had spent three years in the desert with the ascetic Bannus. On his returnto the city he opted for the Pharisaic way of life. He was a precocious manipulator, having travelled to Rome at age 26 to intercede for some priestly friends of his and won his suit by curryingfavor with Nero's wife Poppaea. After his returnfrom Rome, on the basis of actual experience, he could argue more realistically about Roman power against the views of the revolutionary zealots. In the end he was carried along in the general enthusiasm andjoined the great rebellion of 66 as general of the Jewish forces in Galilee. John of Gischala, however, later to become a hero of the resistance, denounced Josephus and his law-and-order regime as traitorous and incited the Galileans to kill him. This unhealthy state of affairs became unhealthier when the troops Josephus had so sedulously trained fled before the Roman armies of Vespasian and his son Titus, and no reserves were forthcoming from Jerusalem. Josephus and forty followers commandeered a stronghold, fled, when it was taken, to a secret hiding place, and made a pact not to allow themselves to fall into the hands of the Romans. They drew lots to establish the order in which they were to die, each at the hands of his comrade. Josephus, who drew the last lot, persuadedthe next to last to surrenderwith him for survival'ssake, the others all having been killed according to plan. When they were brought to Vespasian, Josephus was suddenly inspired to announce that Vespasian would become emperor. By this stroke he himself became a prisoner instead of a corpse. Two years later, upon fulfilment of his prophecy, he was freed, adopted the name of Flavius, and went with Vespasian to Alexandria. He returnedto intercede with the Jews who still held Jerusalemto surrenderto Titus, but they refused. He watched while the city was stormed by the Roman legions. Titus nevertheless was grateful for his efforts and allowed him to rescue certain friends of his who had been captured in the sack of Jerusalem. He was able to bring them back to Rome with him along with some sacred writings. In Rome, his affairs prospered under the patronage of the Flavian emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian: he received Roman citizenship, a pension, and an estate in Judea. Thereafterhe devoted himself to writing and produced the great works by which he is remembered, especially the Jewish Wars, which recounted the story of the disastrous revolt against Rome and The Antiquities of the Jews, the oldest surviving historical narrative of the genre which became popular in Hellenistic times. Josephus died sometime toward the end of the first century or at the beginning of the second century of our era.

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

17

THE

THIRD

WALL

OF

AGRIPPA

I

EMMET W. HAMRICK

Josephus reports that Jerusalem at the time of the Roman siege in A.D. 70 had three north walls (J. W. 5. 136-60). The third or outermost, he says, had been started by Herod Agrippa I (A.D. 41-44), but after completing little more than

itsfoundation he suspended work on the wall. It wasfinished by the Jewish insurgents of the First Revolt between the retreat of Cestius Gallus and the attack of Titus (A.D. 66- 70). Josephus, who lavishes praise on the wall, traces its line with respect to several Ist-century landmarks. 1 The modern attempt to identify the third wall with actual archeological remains began when Edward Robinson made a topographical study of Jerusalem in 1838. He categorically identified a massive east-west line of wall about 400 m. north of the present Old City with the third wall of Agrippa I. A lengthy debate followed (for a summary, see J. Simons, Jerusalem in the Old Testament, chap. VIII). The controversy over the identification of the third wall was heated and emotional because those who accepted Robinson's conclusions usually maintained that the second wall ran along the line of the present wall of the Old City. If the second wall, the northernmost in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, encompassed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of the church would be inauthentic. The exact line of the second wall cannot be traced with certainty, but Kathleen Kenyon's excavation has indicated that the site of the church was outside the city wall at the time of Jesus. Archeology played a minor role in the quest for the third wall until the extensive excavations in 1925-27 and 1940 conducted by E.L. Sukenik and L.A. Mayer. These scholars uncovered segments of wall along the Robinson line extending more than 750 m. from west to east. Influencedas much by Josephus as by what they had dug, they identifiedthe wall as Agrippa's.They were supported Emmet W. Hamrick is Chairmanof the Department of Religion at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

18

by such scholars as W.F. Albright, but opposed by such others as L.H. Vincent of the IEcoleBiblique. Neither Sukenik and Mayernor their predecessors had subjected the wall to a carefully controlled stratigraphicexamination as Kathleen Kenyon did for the first time in 1965. She cut three trenches against a portion of the wall lying between the American School (Albright Institute) and Nablus Road. The data derived from this excavation confirmed many of the views of Sukenik and Mayer but also led to a number of different conclusions. The segments of the wall uncovered by Kenyon varied from 4.30 to 4.80 m. in width. The faces were constructed of a heterogeneous mixture, on the one hand of large, beautifully drafted Herodian-type ashlars, and on the other of crudely shaped boulders and fiold stones. The bedrock, although cleared, had not been shaped to accommodate the wall. Masses of mortar and pebbles had been laid down as a bed for the foundation and also to fill the irregular spaces between the stones. The wide area between the two faces was filled with mortar and field stones. 2 These findings were substantially the same as those of Sukenik and Mayer, but the ceramic and numismaticevidence suggested a new interpretation. The pottery found in both the foundation trench of the wall and the fill deposited by the builders was from the Ist century A.D.,unmixed with earlier or later sherds. Of the several coins found in the fill which the builders had thrown against the north face, the latest was a procurator MARCH

1977

Con

laeG

-'

DoU"

Of

SFIRST WALLI

0

Fig. 1. The Walls of Jerusalem.

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

100

200

300

400

Drawn by Valerie M. Fargo

19

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Fig. 2. Excavationsat DamascusGate 1964-66:thirdwalland gatewayof AgrippaI (archreconstructedby Hadrian). Drawnby ValerieM. Fargo coin from A.D. 58/59, the fifth year of Nero. It was concluded, therefore, that at least this part of the wall had been built in the Ist century A.D. but not before A.D. 59. Thus Agrippa was not the builder; as the evidence indicated, he had neither laid the foundations nor cleared

A coin found in a sealed laver of the Damascus Gate excavations dates the wall uncovered there to the time of Agrippa. the bedrock. Kenyon therefore rejected the idea that this north line was in any respect to be identified with Agrippa's third wall. If the massive north line, so confidently assigned to Agrippa by Sukenik and Mayer, was not the third wall, then where was it? Vincent and others had argued that the third wall had been built approximately on the line of the present north wall of the Old City. Excavation there was to vindicate this theory. 3 In the summer of 1966, Basil Hennessy concluded a two-year excavation at the Damascus Gate. On the east side of the present structure he was able to dig stratigraphicallyagainst the city wall from the modern

20

surface to bedrock, on which he found about a meter of soil with a few burials but no occupation surfaces. The pottery in this layer was early Ist century A.D.,with a few sherdsfrom the Ist century B.C.The foundation trench for the earliest city wall on this line was cut from this layer to bedrock; it contained the same mixture of pottery. This initial layer was sealed by a plastered roadway in which a coin was found from the sixth year of Agrippa I (A.D. 42/43). Since this roadway seals the foundation trench of the earliest wall on this line, Hennessy concluded that he had found the third wall of Agrippa. (Although R.W. Hamilton excavated the upper courses of this wall in 1937-38, he failed to date it correctly because he did not excavate to bedrock.) The proponents of the north-line theory were not convinced. In 1968, M. Avi-Yonah acknowledged the importance of the Herodian masonry at the Damascus Gate, but argued that this wall could have been built by Agrippa as an extension of the second wall, a suggestion Pierre Benoitjustly refersto as a "desperatesolution" (Oui en est la question du "Troisiebme Mur"?[Jerusalem,1976], p. 123). How indeed can one imagine Agrippa extending the second wall to the north while he was engaged in building a much more ambitious wall still further north? Yet another excavation was to stoke up the controversy. In 1972 a segment of the north line of wall was accidentally discovered west of Nablus Road, across the street from the Kenyon excavation site. The salvage operation that followed turned into a major excavation MARCH

1977

and continued intermittently until 1974. This excavation permitted a valuable new look at the wall but offered few clues as to date or identification not already provided by the Sukenik and Kenyon excavations. The claim made by Sara Ben-Arieh, the director, that the foundations of this

Later excavations of the north line suppl' evidence indicating that Agrippa was not the builder. wall had been laid by Agrippa I, is not supported by any other scholar writing today, and was not made even by Sukenik and Mayer. Except for Ben-Arieh, students of the third wall problem agree that Agrippa did not build any of the segments of the north line thus far excavated. Those who maintain that this is the third wall attribute all its known segments to the Jews of the First Revolt, surmising that whatever building Agrippa may have done was on the as yet undiscovered east and west extensions of the line. This was the view of Sukenik and Mayer and Albright, and more recently of Avi-Yonah. 4

Fig. 3. DamascusGate. 1964-66Excavationsat Arch, (bottomleft). EDWARD ROBINSON born in (1794-1863), was the son of a Connecticut, Southington, Congregational minister. Robinson also pursued biblical studies, and in 1837 he was appointed professor of Biblical Literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1838 he left the United States for three years to continue his training in Germany and to explore Palestine. A pioneer of biblical geography, Robinson identified over 100 biblical sites, largely on the basis of local tradition and the modern Arabic names of the sites. This massive undertaking is recorded in his Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions (1841; expanded and revised in 1856). For the identification of remains in and around Jerusalem he relied heavily on Josephus, notably for the location of David's city and Agrippa's third wall. He aroused a furor with his insistence that "the hypothesis which makes the second wall so run as to exclude the alleged site of the Holy Sepulchre, is on topographical grounds untenable and impossible" (BR 1.287). However brilliant or wayward Robinson's other contributions, he is probably most widely known for the discovery of the arch which bears his name. Believed by Robinson, and by many after him, to be the remains of a Herodian viaduct which spanned the Tyropoeon Valley, the arch was actually part of a staircase leading from the valley up to the temple compound. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

Why do the defenders of the north line as the third wall cling so tenaciously to their view'?Two reasons are offered: first, the controversial evidence in Josephus, particularly his description of the route of the wall; and second, the presence of a large wall. The third began at the tower Hippicus, whence it stretchednorthwardto the tower Psephinus,and then descendingoppositethe monumentsof Helena... and proceedingpastthe royalcavernsit bent rounda corner toweroveragainstthe so-calledFuller'stombandjoining the ancient rampartterminatedat the valley called Kedron(J.W. 5. 147-48) Although the Fuller's tomb at the southeast extremity of the wall is as yet unidentified, Hippicus is well known as part of the Citadel. The third wall therefore

A massive wall to the north is undeniably there. If it is not Agrippa's third wall, what is it? began near the modern Jaffa Gate, continued northward, and turned east at the tower Psephinus. Advocates of the south-line theory have proposed that Psephinus be identified with Goliath's Castle (Tancred'sTower) under the Ecole des Freres at the northwest corner of the Old City, but recent excavations have shown the structureto be medieval. Proponents of the north-line theory have contended that it is located somewhere in the Russian Compound. There is no reliable archeological evidence from either site, but Avi-Yonah opts for the Russian Compound on the basis of a statement in Josephus that

21

from the top of Psephinus, one could see as far as Transjordan in the east and the Mediterranean in the west. It is true that a tower in the Russian Compound might be as much as twelve meters higher than Goliath's Castle, but Josephus' datum is not substantial enough to pinpoint the location of Psephinus. The statement smacks of hyperbole, to which Josephus occasionally succumbed. 5 The monuments of Helena are clearly the so-called Tombs of the Kings, opposite which the third wall descended. Since the Greek preposition translated "opposite"can refer to landmarksclose to or distant from each other, either line could be opposite the Tomb of the Kings, especially if no other landmark lay between the two points. The third wall then proceeded past the royal caverns. Benoit is correct in saying that it is mere quibbling to pretend that the royal caverns could be

20th-century archeological discoveries seem to conflict with 1st-centuryhistorical testimony. anything but Solomon's Quarries.The Greek preposition here translated "past" normally means "through" or "alongside."The south line does run through or alongside Solomon's Quarries, but Benoit considers it highly improbable that the preposition would have been used of the north line, some 400 m. to the north. In addition to the evidence in Josephus, scholars have been unwilling to concede that the north line is not Agrippa's wall simply because this massive defensive barrier is there. Unless it is the third wall, it is unaccounted for in ancient records. Avi-Yonah writes, "The utter inability of all those rejectingthe identity of the wall excavated in 1925-27 with the Third Wall to suggest an acceptable alternative is the strongest argument for such an identification."But the presentwriter agrees with Benoit that there is an alternative worthy of serious consideration. 6 This theory holds that the north line was a defense wall planned and built entirely between A.D. 66 and 70 by the Jewish insurgents, who had learned from Cestius Gallus how vulnerable the city was from the north. The wall might have been, and we suggest was, constructed as a formidable barricade against the cavalry and heavy equipment which were likely to be deployed in the only place with easy access to the city, which was flanked by deep valleys on the east, west, and south sides. To be sure, it was not planned as a temporaryoutwork; the Jews who built it had no idea that Jerusalem would be destroyed

22

within four years. Obviously meant as a permanent part of the defense system of the city, it was positioned approximately 400 m. from the third wall, which would then be beyond the range of Roman catapults (J. W. 5. 270). The remains of the wall show that it was hastily built. Aware that the retreatof Cestius was not the end of the Roman attempt to crush them, the Jewish defenders apparently gathered field stones and boulders, worked feverishly in nearby quarries, and cannibalized buildings,

An alternative theory about the north line posits a wall built more than twenty years after Agrippa's death and not mentioned by Josephus. probably those wrecked by Cestius' recent operations. Out of this hodgepodge of materials, they erected a mammoth wall over 4 m. wide and fortified with towers. It probably extended from the slopes of the upper Kidron Valley in the east to the high ground overlooking the upper Hinnom Valley in the west. It was the first line of defense for the third wall, which was simultaneously being completed some 400 m. to the south. Small wonder that no trace has been found of a southward continuation of this wall on either side. There would have been no need for north-south extensions if the wall had been designed only to block the invasion route from the north. If the argument is correct, then we must deal with the conclusion that Josephus never mentioned this imposing wall. How could that be? The fact is that he failed to refer in his writings to an even more impressive wall of Jerusalem, namely the great southern barrierbuilt by Agrippa along the crest of the Hinnom and Kidron Valleys. (This wall was first traced by Bliss and Dickie, but not dated correctly until the Kenyon excavation.) Josephus presumably ignored the southern wall because it was not central to his story. This may be the reason that he failed to mention the northern line. In any event, Titus did not storm the freshly completed northern barricade.Instead he went around it, to the astonishment of the Jews, and attacked the third wall from the west, not far from the Hippicus tower (J. W. 5. 259-60, 284). Since there had been no confrontation at the northern line, Josephus had no compelling reason to note its existence. One can therefore defend the following claims: 1) that Agrippa'sthirdwall ran approximately along the line of the present north wall; 2) that the north line was built more than two decades after the end of Agrippa's reign; and 3) that there is after all a credible alternative to the idea that the north wall must be Agrippa's by default.

MARCH

1977

GAIUS CESTIUS GALLUS was governor of Syria from A.D. 65 until his death in A.D. 67. He was appointed by Nero to succeed the great soldier Corbulo who had capped an illustrious career by accepting Nero's advice to commit suicide. This unhappy example may account for Gallus' unimpressive performance in the Near East. Appealed to by both the Jews and the deservedly unpopular procurator, Gessius Florus, on the eve of the First Jewish Revolt, Gallus sent a member of his staff to Jerusalem to investigate the complaints. Little seems to have come of this diplomatic mission, and when the Jews had taken control of Masada and Jerusalem, he decided a show of Roman strength was necessary. In the autumn of

66 Gallus set out from Antioch with a force of nearly 30,000. He burned and pillaged his way to Jerusalem A.D.

where the Zealots had withdrawn behind the walls of the inner city. Gallus advanced to the second wall and encamped opposite the royal palace in the upper city. For five days the Romans stormed the walls of the Temple Mount; on the sixth they succeeded in undermining the north wall. With victory in reach, Gallus ordered a retreat. Possibly he was bribed by Florus; possibly he feared being caught in hostile country with winter approaching. Whatever the reason, the decision was disastrous. Retreat swiftly became rout. Caught in the mountain passes, the Roman troops were savaged by the rebels. By the time Gallus reached Antioch, he had lost the better part of his baggage train, the war chest, the standard, and 6,000 men.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, William Foxwell. "Recent Works on the.Topography and Archaeology of Jerusalem,"JQR 22 (1931-32), 40916. . "New Light on the Walls of Jerusalem in the New Testament Age,"BASOR no. 81 (Feb. 1941), 6-10. Avi-Yonah, M. "The Third and Second Walls of Jerusalem," IEJ XVIII (1968), 98-125. Ben-Arieh, Sara and Netzer, E. "Excavations along the 'Third Wall' of Jerusalem, 1972-1974," IEJ XXIV (1974), 97-107. Benoit, Pierre. Oti en est la question du "troisibme Mur"? Jerusalem, 1976. Hamilton, R.W. "Excavations Against the North Wall of Jerusalem, 1937-38," QDAP X (1940), 1-57. Hamrick, E.W. "New Excavations at Sukenik's 'Third Wall,"' BASOR no. 183 (Oct. 1966), 19-26. . "Further Notes on the 'Third Wall,"' BASOR no. 192 (Dec. 1968), 21-25. Hennessy, J.B. "Preliminary Report on Excavations at the Damascus Gate Jerusalem, 1964-6," Levant II (1970), 22-27. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

Kenyon, Kathleen M. "Excavations in Jerusalem 1961-63," BA 27 (May, 1964), 34-52. _ "Excavations in Jerusalem, 1965," PEQ (Jan-June, 1966), 73-88. . Jerusalem: Excavating 3,000 years of history. New York, 1967. Robinson, Edward. Biblical Researches in Palestine. Vol. I. Boston, 1841. Simons, J. Jerusalem in the Old Testament. Leiden, 1952. Sukenik, E.L. and Mayers, L.A. The Third Wall of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, 1930. . "A New Section of the Third Wall, Jerusalem." PEQ (1944), 145-151. Vincent, L.H. "La troisieme enceinte de Jerusalem," RB XXXVI (1927), 516-548; XXXVII (1928), 80-100, 321339. "Encore la troisieme enceinte de Jerusalem," RB LIV (1947), 90-126. . Jbrusalemde l'Ancien Testament. Partie I. Paris, 1954.

23

til

Fig. 1. Barrekub,rulerof Samcal,withhisscribe.Froma steleof BarrekubfromZinjirli(Samcal),mid-8thcenturyB.C. Drawnby ValerieM. Fargo

THE

BIRTH

OF

BUREAUCRACY

CLYDE CURRY SMITH

The development of urban civilization during the fourth millennium B.C.E., based on an agricultural economy of surplus, gave rise to the utilitarian phenomenon of writing. Whoever the actual inventors, the Sumerians of "the Uruk countryside" provide the earliest known examples, still pictographic or logographic, in the last century of that millennium. By the opening centuries of the next, writing had spread throughout central Sumei and its possessions and, with some alterations, east of the Tigris into Elam. It developed, according to need, in a diverse language system in Egypt, and had probably reached the Indus valley via Dilmun by mid-third millennium. Cllde Curry Smith is Professor of Ancient History at the of' Wisconsin at River Falls. University

24

The evolution of writing and its early widespread use as a bureaucratic instrument By then the pictograph-logograph had given partial way in Sumer to phonetic cuneiform, which remained basic not only to the subsequent commercial lingua franca but to the shared writing process itself until it was finally displaced by the simplified linear alphabet of West Semitic peoples during the first millennium B.C.E. Cuneiform was still being used in Uruk, however, as late as C.E.75. For three thousand years, this writing base, whether using the older logograms, the later, simpler limited syllabary, or a mixture of the two, provided a means of communication for Sumerians, Elamites, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Kassites, Hurrians, Hittites, Ugaritians, Urartians, Achaemenid Persians,

MARCH 1977

and various others, to whom must be added, on the evidence of the exciting recent discoveries at Tell Mardikh, the Upper Euphratean people of Ebla. The oldest written texts show bureaucracyalready at work in the act of writing itself, since to use the cumbersome script required highly specialized training in scribal schools, which were almost as widespread as writing. The schools were responsible for both business and literary texts. By 2800 B.C.E.the scribal school at Tell Abu Salabikh, for instance, was providing a corpus of literary tradition that gives some sense of how this urban civilization with its bureaucratic elements had come into being. The impact of bureaucracy upon cuneiform writing is most impressively demonstrated by the enormous yet ever-growing corpus of lexical texts, studied and reconstructed by the late Benno Landsberger and his successors for the UNESCO-funded "Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon," published by the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome. With fourteen folios available and the remaining four in process, the initial phase is nearly complete and reveals that what had begun with the Sumerian scribal schools, achieved in the cuneiform world a level unknown elsewhere in antiquity: the functional equivalent of unilingual and multilingual dictionaries. They exemplify the Latin proverb:quod non est in verbo non est in mundo. We do not yet understand how the scribal school relates to the other aspects of the civilization, but we know that it is part of what A. Leo Oppenheim has called "those two great organizations," the palace and the temple. Some twenty years ago, in his essay on "The Earliest Political Development in Ancient Mesopotamia," Thorkild Jacobsen noted society's growing needs as it moved toward monarchy, and illustrated the complexity even of incipient bureaucracy by showing its relationship to a more primitive past. The nascent bureaucracy strongly resembled the bureaucracy that existed when cuneiform civilization was destroyed in the latter part of the first millennium

B.C.E. We must remember Henri

Frankfort's appropriate warning to look beneath the superficial similarities when comparing phenomena for their functional distinctions. But methodologically, we may proceed with Jacobsen in the direction which "the evidence makes it reasonable for us" to understand. The hierarchy of the state as an outgrowth of the hierarchy of the household; bureaucracy as the result of economic enterprise That the origins of royal administrations lie in earlier household procedures, difficult to document since they antedate writing, is nevertheless borne out by the meaning of titles of the highest administrative officers: thus sukkal-mah, "chief page-boy," became "vizier";Sagub, "donkey-tender,"became "general,"etc. (Jacobsen, 1957:119, incl. n. 59). This duplicity in terminology operates throughout cuneiform usage and is confirmed not only in later myth and epic but in Early Dynastic III records from a palace at Fara, ancient Shurrupak. These BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

records, chiefly ration-lists, were found in a building which, though of modest size, because of its early date can be assumed to be the palace--the slightly "biggerhouse," e-gal, of the slightly "bigger man," li-gal, who served as warlord/leader for the small paramilitary contingent of the city. Several hundred persons were organized along the lines of a household with "chamberlains (uri), deputies (mdskim), pages (sukkal), cup-bearers (sagi), cooks (mubaldim),

musicians (hI-A D), .

.

. down to

craftsmen of various kinds:smiths, basketryworkers, etc. The number of persons within these ranks . . appears to be almost impossibly high . . . no less than 144 cup-

bearers, 113 musicians and singers, 65 cooks and so on" (Jacobsen 1957:120-21, with notes). Surprisingly, the scribe does not appear, yet the records exist.

Fig. 2. Scribesmakinga head count of the slain. Fromthe "Battlein the Marshes,"SouthwestPalaceof Sennacherib at Nineveh(Kuyunjik).7th centuryB.C. Drawnby ValerieM. Fargo Ignace Jay Gelb, in his presidentialaddress of 1966 to the American Oriental Society, pointed out that the data in the many archives allow us, as a first step toward an overview of the structure of this ancient society, a glance at any element from oils and fats through craftsmen to his favorite onions, all parts of the ration system. While few follow his lead, his work of the past decade illuminates the types of labor and social classes, including prisoners of war, which gave most of ancient Mesopotamia its character within the framework of its "relatively low agricultural economy, with its incipient surplus production" (Gelb, 1973:95). Yet out of that economy and its varying productivity arose the need for management and direction-for bureaucracy. A discussion of the birth of bureaucracymust note the enormous quantity of cuneiform tablets, not to

25

mention supportive artifacts, accumulated in 130-odd years of excavation since Paul Emile Botta and Austin Henry Layard first dug for the Assyrian capitals at a time when the older Sumerian remained to be discovered. Such students of cuneiform as Samuel Noah Kramer, Donald John Wiseman, and A. Leo Oppenheim have estimated the total tablet inventory at more than half a million, less than ten percent published, of which some ninety-five percent are economic or administrative, some no bigger than a thumbnail, some a full forearm long, although the average tablet can be held comfortably in one hand. Since clay tablets often concern actual transactions of sales and contracts, from real estate and manufactured goods to wives and children, the bureaucracy'sscribes occasionally made several copies of the tablets and more often clay envelopes with partial to full summaries of the contents. The unpublished wealth of the bureaucratic archives The entire excavated archive cannot be catalogued briefly, but a few important examples, listed in approximate order of recovery rather than original chronology, will indicate the bureaucratic accomplishment. Such a listing must begin with the more than 25,000 tablets and fragments found from 1849 by Layard at Kuyunjik (Nineveh) and enlarged by each subsequent excavation, chiefly representing Ashurbanipal's library. Oppenheim has given an overview of this vast array, which literally created Assyriology and, from the outset, implied Sumerology (1964:15-20), but the "deeds and documents" of the Neo-Assyrian kings from Sargon on, initially studied by Claude Hermann Walter Johns, really recreated the vast accompanying administrative bureaucracy. What Kuyunjik was to the later and Assyrian history, Nippur has been to the earlier and Babylonian, its more than 35,000 tablets documenting both the continuity of the Sumerian achievement through Kassite times and the operations of the business firm of Muragu in the Persian period. Telloh (ancient Girsu), excavated in the same era as Nippur, although plundered by natives, has produced more than 30,000 tablets to illuminate the Ur III Dynasty; Sippar, documenting the Old Babylonian era, perhaps double that quantity. While many sites excavated since the turn of the century have yielded archives of several hundred to several thousand tablets-among them Qalat Serqat (ASur), Al Uhaimer (Kish), Yorgan Tepe (Nuzi), Tell Asmar (EBnunna), Khafaje (Tutub), Tell Billa (;ibaniba), Tell Abu Harmal (Saduppum), Nimrud (Kalbiu), Sultantepe (lJuzirina), Tell Al Rimah (Karana/Zimablu)-only at Boghazkii (Hattula), Tell Hariri (Mari), and Ras Shamra (Ugarit) in the west, or Susa in the east, before the discoveries at Tell Mardikh (Ebla), have tablets been found in the same quantities as at sites dug in the nineteenth century. The academic tragedy is that when so many tablets are discovered they remain unpublished, and before a collection can be adequately catalogued vast new hoards accumulate. And scholars prefer to study historic annal,

26

literary epic, or religious incantation rather than the mundane records, however meticulous and voluminous, of the bureaucracy. Illustrative of what careful analysis and new approaches can glean from tablets usually considered "boresome and barren" is the group of documents from the Ur III Dynasty, whose detailed study by Tom B. Jones and John W. Snyder revealed that at ancient Drehem, where animals were sorted and redistributed for the various temples of nearby Nippur, the scribes used elaborate double-entry book-keeping to tabulate receipts and their sources plus distribution with their destinations. Record-keeping and filing systems A recent summary of a current excavation suggests what we can learn about the scribal bureaucracy from the materials found: At its northendthetrenchtoucheda building[atTell ed-Der],in the small courtyardof which were found sixty scholastictablets,preservedin a little depression filledwithclay.On resumingworkin 1975,a largerpart of this buildingwas uncovered,after the removalof some Kassitefoundationsand a layerof abandonment some20-40cm. thick.At the eastof the courtyardthere appearedroomsfilledwithdebrisandbeamscarbonized by conflagration.Furtherdown, on the floors and relativelywell-protectedby the collapse of the roof, therelay morethan2,000tabletsgroupedin basketsor woodenchests.Preliminarystudyallowsus to say that these are the archivesof Ur-dUtu,chief lamentationpriest of the temple of the goddess Annunitum.The contentsof thetexts,whichareessentiallyeconomicand

~OTM'Y~Y(ft

0"~~

`

Fig. 3. Scribescountingtrees,part of the booty from the "Battlein the Marshes."Partof the same slab as no. 2. Drawn by Valerie M. Fargo

MARCH

1977

5_)

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f

Fig. 4. Officialsof Tiglath-pileserIII recordingspoils aftera victory:sheep,goats, cattle,prisoners.Reignof Tiglath-

pileser III, Central Palace at Nimrud, 8th century B.C.

show thatwe probablyaredealingwith administrative, the priest'sprivate residence.It seems to have been destroyedby fire in Ammi-saduqa'stwelfthyear[1635 B.C.E.] ...

Iraq 38 (1976) 75

Such containers, functionally equivalent to our file drawers, have regularly been identified since at least the turn of the century-at Nippur by Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht or at Babylon by Robert Koldewey-though on the basis of material from much earlier excavations at Nineveh, Leonard William King in 1915 perceived that their Akkadian name girginakku could even mean "library" when applied to a large enough collection. Between two burnt benches in the scribal chamber ZT4 in the north wing of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, Max Mallowan found two rows of open brick boxes, one row with seven and one with six boxes, which he labelled "filing-cabinets"and which he surmised originally held "different classes of documents which had to be immediately available for reference."Not in the boxes but in the debris which filled the chamber, he found more than 350 tablets, the largest number in any one room at Nimrud (1966:I, 172-73, incl. fig. 106). In the larger and BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

Drawn by Valerie M. Fargo

later palace archives, such as these of the Assyrian kings, where whole rooms often held tablets of only a single literary species, whether grammatical or religious, catalogue tablets of these special contents were made and descriptive clay labels affixed to the containers. Jack Sasson, on the other hand, has used Mari to show that such classification procedures were not used in secondmillennium palaces and that it was extremely complicated to retrievea document or anything else from a storeroom (1972:55-67). The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-627), like his dynastic predecessors back at least to Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208), and especially Tiglath-Pileser I (11151077) with his sophisticated library at Assur, actively sought literary materials. This is borne out by two copies of his letters, preserved by his officials, but especially-since he, unlike most kings, boasted that he could read and write "the artfully written text whose Sumerian version is obscure and whose Akkadian version is difficult to clarify" (kammu naklu sa gumeru sullulu akkadu ana gutes'uriastu)--by the colophons he prepared for the tablets. The colophon was used for a literary, the seal for an archival, document. In transactions the tablets were "sealed"by a cylinder rolled on the surface, although

27

among lower economic groups a nail impression was made (a typical text begins, "instead of his seal he impressed his fingernail"ku-mu kunukku [NA4 . KIS'IBJsu su-par-suis-kun), a system not unlike fingerprinting,to verify the legal content. Imperial organization and administration Assyrian kingly involvement in the scribal arts brings us to the other side of the birth of bureaucracy. Behind the volume and complexity of record-keeping lay administration. Colin McEvedy's apt statement, "The Assyrian kings were the creators of the administered as opposed to merely tributary empire"(1967:44), is initially attested in their limmu lists, indices of bureaucrats who held the office of limmu by rank and in sequence, which supply an unwieldy but effective chronological device. Both Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead and Emil Forrer, working from references in these lists to officers in royal inscriptions about campaigns and construction, could provide historical perspective on what I call the federalprovincial system of Assyrian government. The 1949-62 British excavations at Nimrud, the Assyrian capital Kalbu, increased our understanding of that system by uncovering in situ caches of bureaucratic texts unlike those previously found at earlier, less carefully conducted or less productive excavations at Nineveh, Assur, Dur-Sharrukin, or Nimrud itself, which supplied details of the royal bureaucracy from the 9th century B.C.E. From the publication of "the Nimrud winelists," for example, J.V. Kinnier-Wilson reconstructed the sequence of officer-triads making up the hierarchical administration of the provinces. Augmented by Postgate's "governor's palace archive," chiefly from the reign of Adad-nirari III (810-782), the details of bureaucratic administration become more significant because of their known locus at Kalbu. The excavator comments, "In the background we visualize through these texts the activities of cereal farmers and

Fig. 5. Cupbearers(eunuchs)of Sargon II at a banquet. From Khorsabad, late 8th century B.C. Drawn by Valerie M. Fargo

28

stock breeders, wine growers, smiths, carpenters, weavers, a host of persons engaged in the textile trade, clothiers, leather workers, chariot makers and the like" (Mallowan in Postgate, 1973:xv). Bureaucracy in bas-relief Renewed efforts by scholars of various national origins, including members of the Polish Center for Mediterranean Archaeology who are reassembling the decorative wall reliefs of Ashurnasirpal's Northwest Palace at Kalbu, and the Iraqis who are newly excavating and reconstructing the palace complexes of the Assyrian capitals, have returnedour attention to those first massive objects with which mid-nineteenth-century men like Botta and Layard initiated the rediscovery of antiquity-the bas-reliefs depicting, among much else, the royal bureaucracyin procession, usually uninscribed. Many were shipped to national museums in Europe and America, where they served as "rocks of unevangelized lands," in a choice phrase taken by John B. Steams from an 1857 address by Edward Hitchcock (1961:3). Other reliefs show scribes, often using two or more writing media, busily recording everything, especially the spoils of conquest, ranging from the severed heads of rebels to expropriated fruit trees. But some items, significant in the canonical literature of the palace libraries, like omens based on malformed births, do not appear on the reliefs. The variety nevertheless brings us full circle to the strong correlation, postulated at the beginning, between civilization and bureaucracy. Future investigations, in an effort to make a coherent whole of all the recovered materials, will certainly reveal not only the antiquity of the modern bureaucracybut the modernity of the ancient. BIBLIOGRAPHY Gelb, Ignace Jay 1965 "The Ancient Mesopotamian Ration System." JNES 24, 230-243. 1967 "Approaches to the Study of Ancient Society." JA OS 87, 1-8. 1973 "Prisoners of War in Early Mesopotamia." JNES 32, 70-98. Jacobsen, Thorkild 1957 "Early Political Development in Mesopotamia." Zeitschriftfiir Assyriologie 52, 91-140. McEvedy, Colin 1967 The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History. Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc. Mallowan, Max Edgar Lucien 1966 Nimrud and its Remains. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 2 vols. and plans. Postgate, J. Nicholas 1973 The Governor's Palace Archive. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Sasson, Jack M. 1972 "Some Comments on Archive Keeping at Mari." Iraq 34, 55-67. Stearns, John B. 1961 Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. Graz: Ernst Weidner.

MARCH1977

OIL

FROM OF

THE

PRESSES

TIRAT-YEHUDA RUTH HESTRIN AND ZEEV YEIVIN

In 1970 the Israel Museum reconstructed a late 2nd-century B.C.E.oil-press on the southern slope of the Rehavia Valley.

The press was discovered in 1962, during excavations conducted by the Department of Antiquities and Museums and directed by Z. Yeivin and G. Edelstein, in the area of a fortified farm in Tirat-Yehudah. Under the supervision of Y. Mintzker and the excavators, D. Urman directed the reconstruction, which revealed some of the problems the ancient olive-pressers presumably faced.

There are three [kinds of] olives [on a tree] and from each three kinds of oil. The first olives are picked from the top of the tree, crushed and put inside a basket: Rabbi Yehuda says, around [the sides of] the basket. This is the first. [The olives] are pressed under a beam-Rabbi Yehuda says, with stones-that is the second. They are removed and pressed again-this is the third. The first is for light, the others for the meal-offering.

.

.

. The

Talmud teaches, "pure beaten oil for lighting, but not pure beaten oil for the meal-offering."

entrance in the long western wall. Left of the entrance stood a stone bench for unloading the olives and, nearby, its base embedded in the ground, a clay jar for water. A row of pillars, clearly roof-supports, divided the room, thus separating the cracking installation in the near righthand corner from the squeezing installation beyond the pillars. In the far left corner, thinly walled off by stones, was a space to store containers. Betweenthe cracking and squeezing installations, close to the wall, a shallow, plastered depression in the ground funneled into a small pit.

Menah 8. 4-5.

To produce oil, the olives must be crushed into a soft mash and then squeezed, two separate processes each requiring special equipment. The oil-press that we found was in a rectangular room, 12 m. by ca. 10 m., with an Ruth Hestrin is Curatorof the Israelite and Persian Periods at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Zeev Yeivin is Deputy Director of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums.

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

The Walls In reconstructing the walls, we tried to simulate the ancient header-and-stretcher method by laying partially worked stones with fill but without plaster or mud. The walls were approximately 80 cm. thick, and stones of the same length, called "nails" by the local masons, were laid across the walls to strengthen them. The stones were secured with cement and covered with mud, the ancient structuresupplying part of the masonry.

29

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Fig. 1. Crushing the olives. Close-up of the yam and memel. In the background can be seen one of the weights, with a wooden bar through it, a flat stone to cover the 'aqalim, a "virgin,"and three of the roof-supports.

The Cracking Installation Essential for cracking the olives are the 1.80 cm. yam, or basin, and the 90 cm. memel, or crushing stone (B. Bat. 4.5). The olives are placed on the ram and are cracked as the memel turns horizontally on the yam and at the same time rotates vertically around its own axis. Although the yam was discovered whole, only a part of the memel remained and we had to install a new one, made of stone somewhat harder than the original. In the corner where the cracking installation stands, we built walls 2.5 m. high and extended a horizontal beam from one wall to the other to hold the vertical axle which turns the memel on the yam. The

30

bottom of the axle is fixed in a cavity in the center of the yam, and the top is fitted into a hole in the beam, somewhat larger in diameter than the axle for freedom of movement. A wooden crosspiece goes through the memel so that it can be turned. One end of the crosspiece is free; the other fits into the vertical axle, in a hole 45 cm. above the yam, the length of the memel's radius. To prevent wear of the crosspiece by friction with the memel, a 20 x 20 cm. hole was drilled in the memel, inside of which a wooden bearing the same diameter as the crosspiece was fitted. Wooden pegs in the crosspiece held it in the axle and kept the memel in place. Although all of our wooden parts were made of pine, we cannot tell, because it had long MARCH

1977

since disintegrated, what kind of wood the ancients used. (The present reconstruction at the Israel Museum is made with iron instead of wood.) At first we thought that an animal had been harnessed to the crosspiece to turn the memel, but since the space between installation and walls was so narrow, we decided that human labor had been employed. The wheel, however, proved easy to turn and after two or three rotations the olives were ready for the press.

The First Oil After they were crushed, the olives were put in special baskets (:aqalim in Mishnaic terminology) of a kind still used in the oil-presses of the Judea and Samaria regions. The baskets, made of tightly twisted rope, are tire-shaped and have a diameter of 60 cm. They were filled to a height of 7-10 cm. and piled on top of each other on the plastered depression between the crushing and squeezing installations, beside the small pit mentioned earlier. Into the pit ran the plentiful "first oil" of the Mishna, the oil used "for light."

The Squeezing Installation

in the top of each weight and then passed a wooden bar through the holes in the sides and thus through the loop. It took five people to load the weights, two on each side of the bar to lift it and one to tie the rope to the beam. It was difficult not only to tie the weights but to maintain the correct distance between them and the ground, since the distance decreases as the beam lowers. Once we had fastened them, however, the weights remainedsecurely in place. The squeezing process took us ten hours, weightloading included. At the start only a little oil accumulated, increasing gradually to a steady flow into the collecting pit. There it remained until the water and solid refuse sank and the oil began to float on top, ready to be scooped out with ladles.

Fig. 2. In the foregroundis the beam,upon whichthe weights are hung,lying on top of the empty'aqalim.Next to it are threeweightsand, behindthem,one of the "virgins"and threeroof-supports.At the left is the plastereddepression upon whichthe olives are placedaftercrushingbut before pressing,and, in frontof it, the smallpit into whichthe "first oil"runs.

The squeezing process requires a gath (vat and collecting pit), a beam, five weights, and two "virgins"(B. Bat. 4.5). The gath consists of a depression in the ground 7 cm. deep and a deeper depression beside it to collect the oil. On the vat 12-16 olive-filled Daqalim are piled, to a height of at least 1.2-1.5 m., and a stone slab is placed across the topmost basket. A long heavy beam is then hung with weights to press down upon and squeeze the olives. In the reconstructed oil-press the beam is pine, about 6 m. long, one end fixed to the wall, the other free to accommodate the weights. Since it is twice as far from the free end of the beam to the pressure point on the Daqalim as it is from the pressure point to the fixed end, a weight hanging from the free end produces pressure double its weight. Five weights found lying in a row during the excavation were used in the reconstructed press. The weights are roughly pyramidal, flat on top, each varying a little from the average individual weight of 300 kg. A hole, 10 cm. in diameter, in each side, connects with a hole in the top to accommodate the rope by which the weights are hung. On either side of the gath stand two rectangular pillars 1.5 m. high-the "virgins"(B. Bat. 67.72)-one of which was brought from the excavation. Their purpose soon became clear: the long, heavy beam, to which we laboriously lifted and tied the weights, could be rested against a crossbar placed on top of the "virgins." The weights had to be attached to the beam before squeezing could begin. In order to load them (tkinah in the sources), we threaded a loop of rope through the hole BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

31

firstand readingas follows:ga-atA-za-la,"belongingto Azala."WhetherAzalais a personalnameorthenameof a city,indicatedbythecircleis notclear.[Note"Azalla"in

THE

NUZI

EBLA

NADEZHDA FREEDMAN Nearly 50 years ago the oldest known map in the world was discovered at modern Yorghan Tepe, a mound ten miles southwest of Kirkuk in Iraq and the site of ancient Nuzi.1 What the Nuzi map charts is uncertain even though the greater part of the tablet is preserved. Clearly marked in the lower left corner of the map, for example, is the city of Magkan-disr-eblaor Ma-gin-bidebla, but other names on the map are tantalizingly incomplete, open to conjecture, or simply mysterious. With Ebla very much in the news at present, the temptation to establish at least the western boundary of the map by identifying the Nuzi Ebla with the Syrian city is hard to resist. The Nuzi map, despite its name, is one of the socalled Gasur texts and predates the invasion of the city of Gasur by the Hurrianswho renamed it Nuzi. The cache of economic and business documents among which the map was found date to the Old Akkadian period (ca. 23602180 B.C.E.). Like the Ebla tablets, these combine elements of two languages, in this case chiefly Akkadian of the time of Sargon of Akkad, but also Sumerian ideograms. Magkan-dur-ebla, for example, is the Akkadian renderingof the city on the map; Mag-gan-badebla (possibly "the site of the fortress of Ebla"), the Sumerian. The epigrapherfor the Nuzi expedition, Theophile Meek, assumed that since the map was found among business documents it was "prepared to indicate the location of some estate,"2 presumably a local one. would thus be somewhere near Gasur, a Magkan-duir-ebla bolstered supposition by references in the Hurrian texts from Nuzi to a city named DUir-ubla. Meek himself, however, had tentatively identified the city on the map with the Ebla referred to in inscriptions of Sargon and Naram-Sin, although he finally concluded that an Ebla in Syria was too far away to appear on a Nuzi estate map (letter to Professor Starr, 3 March 1932). Like Ebla, however, Gasur was a thriving commercial center, the texts revealing a varied business community with farflung enterprises. It seems at least possible that Ebla was a trading partner and the tablet, rather than a record of land-holdings, a "road-map." The tablet, which is approximately 6 x 6.5 cm., is inscribed only on the obverse. There are several complete words, but because the edges are damaged, particularly the southern one, some signs are broken or destroyed. In the centerof the map is a circle,to the left of which appearsthe inscription10 BUR 10 BUR minus6 GAN MA4-A,i.e., "180+180-6(354)gan or iku of cultivated land"(slightlymorethan 300 acres).To the rightof the circle is anotherinscription,apparentlycontinuingthe

32

the Reallexikon der Assyriologie: a place in the Palmyran

steppes between Jarki and Damascus, mentionedby It is to be notedthat othercircleson the AssurbAnipal.] map do indicatecities, but they all have their names writtenwithinthe circles. Meek, xvii. The only city name preservedcompletely is Magkan-duirebla in the lower left corner of the tablet, on the side marked IM-MAR-TU, "west"(the lower side of the tablet in the photograph). The opposite side is inscribed IMKUR, "east,"and in the left corner of this side is another city, possibly Guziad, but only the final sign ad is clear. The first signs of a third city, to the right of the center of the map, are also preserved: Bi-ni-za-. A river or an irrigation canal, inscribed Ra-hi-um, "outflowing" or "fructifier,"runs from north to south through the center of the map. Three channels fill the Rahi-um from what may be a large body of water if the broken lines along the tablet's northern edge indicate waves. The traces of writing in this area are not helpful:gi is the final sign, possibly preceded by gur, giving "gurgi." Along the whole course of this region a narrow rectangularspace has been ruledoff by the scribeas a kibirtum[i.e., one of the four quartersof the earthas in kibrdtarbd'im],upon which he has writtenthe legend IM-IR, "north."He has no kibirtumruled off for the otherdirections,so that this and the regionmarkedwith broken lines may have been intendedto representan indefinite,undefinedareain the north,the sourceof the watersupply. Meek, xvii. Another channel flows into the river or canal from the west to the southeast, its name again largely obliterated; the signs may be im-da or (hu)-ru-um.

The mountain ranges, one in the west and one in the east, are clear but uninscribed. Meek suggests that these are the Zagros Mountains and the chain of hills running north and south through Kirkuk. The rivers would then be either the Little Zab or the Radanu and the Tigris, unless they are simply irrigation canals. With the current discoveries, however, it is impossible not to speculate about mountains and rivers in the west rather nearer to Syria and Ebla.

NOTES 'The 1930-31excavation,directedby F. S. Starr,was underthejoint auspicesof the SemiticMuseumand the Fogg Art Museumof HarvardUniversity,and the AmericanSchool of OrientalResearchat Baghdad. 2TheophileJames Meek, Old Akkadian, Sumerian, and Cappadocian Texts from Nuzi, Excavations at Nuzi, Vol. 3,

Harvard Semitic Series, Vol. 10 (Cambridge:Harvard UniversityPress, 1935),xvii. MARCH

1977

MESOPOTAMIAAND SYRIA U

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BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

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33

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Fig. 1. The imposing "saw-line"wall just after excavation.

THE

OF RENASCENCE

IRON

AGE

ARAD

JACKSON CAMPBELL

I saw Tell Arad for the first time in August, 1968, when my wife and I were on our way to inspect what would soon be our home in the new town of Arad. The ancient tell seemed to impose itself upon the surrounding plain like a reclining elephant, in no way dwarfed by the rising foothills of the Judean mountains to the north. A month later we made our first visit to the mound, unguided, knowing only that we were in the midst of great antiquity. My relationship with the tell began in the summer of 1971, when Professor Ruth Amiran, in the middle of the digging season, very kindly conducted us through the early Canaanite city that had been unearthed. Thereafter I was a frequent visitor, in the summers participating in the dig in the lower city and noting with dismay how the

34

citadel was degenerating for want of preservation. The western wall collapsed during a particularly heavy rain in the winter of 1973; by 1976 all but one of the fieldstones facing the altar had been removed or had disintegrated. Where once the royal Judean border fortress had stood, a neglected and abandoned ruin now lay. I thought often about the possibility of rehabilitating the site and occasionally talked about it, but it was a welcome surprise nonetheless to be commissioned in February 1976 to preserve and restore ancient Iron Age Arad. Funds for the project were made available by the National Parks Authority of Israel and Arad's local town council. Tell Arad, 6 km. from the modern city, is actually a double site: an Early Bronze city that flourished from MARCH

, "

.

1977

.

. ..

,?g

C*-wJ6: 41pp

-.do

z

44 -ft .

%loc

Fig. 2. The collapsedwesternwall, victimboth to weatherand neglect.

3100 to 2700 B.C.E., and a royal citadel established during the reign of Solomon and occupied, with occasional interruptions caused by enemy action, through the monarchic, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Arabic periods, to be abandoned permanently about 700 C.E. 1 Throughout the site's history, the name Arad has never changed. It apparently refers to a species of donkey (called carod), prevalent in the area, and possibly bred in Arad, thus giving the city its name. During the past season's excavations in the lower Early Bronze city, I counted 22 of these donkeys, the property of the Bedouin workers and still a satisfactory means of local transport. Our restoration project began in the citadel, which had been partially excavated by the late Professor Y. Aharoni in consecutive years from 1962 to 1967.' Outstanding in its outer construction was the great "sawline" wall, the western side of which had been almost completely excavated. Inside was an extraordinary Judean sanctuary, with a sacrificial altar of earth and fieldstones laid out as prescribed in Exod 20:24-25, a court, a porch, and a Holy of Holies. Quite apart from the quantity of rubble that had to be removed to expose the line of the original wall, two major challenges confronted us. One was to reconstruct the collapsed western wall. Tell Arad rises from a hill of soft and fragile Eocene chalk, out of which the wall was made. When the wall collapsed, most of its larger stones simply broke into fragments. In rebuilding, we were forced to use smaller stones. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

Our other problem was to determine which mortar would best bond the stones. Since the original simple earth and crushed limestone mortar had withstood the inroads of time, we decided to use the same mixture. Its advantages were manifold: 1) The material was inexpensive and the supply almost unlimited. 2) It looked natural and unrestored. 3) It was structurally the soundest, giving plasticity to the soft stone and letting it carry its own weight constantly and evenly. Soil from the rubble was therefore sifted and recycled. Whereas we had previously dumped soil over the edge of the terracemade by the bulldozers, now we added each bucketload to the burgeoningmountain of soil, soon

The name Arad, attached to the site for nearlyv4,000 years,apparentlv derivesfrom a small, local donkeyv. to be sifted and used for our mortar. The sifting operation, incidentally, produced interesting archeological results. In the pottery and other artifactsthat the workers separated from the stone rubble were an early Israelite seal made from the local chalk stone, several Hebrew ostraca, and a scrimshaw. On the original crew there were, besides myself, three of my sons, an American archeology student who had become interested in the work of restoration, and a Bedouin from the nearby Saana tribe. In the months since we started, the work force has been enlarged to 10, but the task has expanded proportionately.

35

When the western wall was nearly rebuilt, we decided to continue by clearing and restoring the southern wall. While removing the debris, we discoverd that the southeast and southwest corners were missing altogether, casualties, perhaps, of the attack by Pharaoh Shishak upon Judea around 920 B.C.E.Along the baseline of the wall quantities of grain and broken pottery were found under a layer of ash. We were able to determine the

however, we decided not to finish the wall until we had cleared the eastern and northernexposures of the citadel. 2 When Professor Aharoni excavated about halfway along the eastern wall in 1967, he exposed part of the wall, a tower, and a small section of revetment at the northern end. The southern part had not been excavated, but had been conjectured on the plan I was to use as a guide. I confess that the next stage in the work inspired nightmares. Since we are restorers rather than archeologists, we brought in a bulldozer. We removed about two meters of soil from the top of the mound along the supposed wall line and found nothing. Next we removed a meter of soil from the outer side of the revetment in order to get a clean, straight line so that we could clean the revetment's inner face. Now we were closer to the still-hidden face of the eastern wall. At last a muted thud, and the momentary cough of the bulldozer in overload: we had reached solid construction. An hour of hand-cleaning with shovels and hoes revealed the base -all that remained-of the southern tower, but not where it was supposed to be. The plan must be redrawn. Our work has clarified the gateway, but the interpretation of the towers and the gate they guarded must be left to the archeologists. Such are the discoveries that occasionally rewardthe restorer,who follows wall lines and foundations as he finds them (and find them he must).

We brought in a bulldozer to find the eastern wall only to discover that its course on theplan didnot coincide with its course in the mound. location of the corner by extending the lines of the southern and western wall. We rebuilt it with a foundation first of smaller and gradually larger stones. Where the citadel once lay destroyed and partly buried under a mound of debris and wind-fill, it began to emerge from the rubble and announce its presence to all who approached. Although the "saw-line"of the southern wall, like that of the western, was intact, it was no more than a meter and a half high, as opposed to the western wall's nearly four meters before its collapse in 1973. The ancient builders had clearly gone to enormous effort to make the wall impregnable; it is between three and four meters thick, built of closely fitted rubble stone. After we had repaired broken sections and replaced missing ones, •,v•,Ig..

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36

MARCH

1977

After clearing the eastern wall with its two towers flanking an as yet undefined gateway, we proceeded immediately to the northern wall. Here again the "sawline" was sharply marked, but the wall was poorly preserved. It had either been razed partially or had collapsed centuries ago from natural causes, to be rebuilt on fallen, misaligned stones. We had no alternative but to remove the facing and a meter of the rubble fill behind it and then rebuild. 3

As this is being written, the work continues, with the southern tower of the gateway now raised almost four meters from the ground; the northern wall has been repaired and steadily approaches its final height. We plan to finish restoring the outer walls of the citadel and then move inside. Within the limits of existing knowledge and practical considerations, we expect to restore the sanctuary, the cistern with its aqueduct, and possibly other structures,as yet unexcavated, of this 10thcentury B.C.E. Israelite royal citadel.

Concurrently we are doing basic preservation and restoration in several areas of the Early Bronze city. The cult basin next to the bamah (high place) has been sufficiently reinforced to be left open to view. We also

intend to repair and rebuild parts of the outer wall of the city and some of the more important interiorwalls so that visitors to the settlement can get an immediate idea of its general dimensions and layout. As we worked, we often regretted that preservation had not been undertaken at the time of excavation or immediately thereafter, when time, money, and the original structures might have been saved. The altar, for example, will be rebuilt to accord as closely as

Restoration work continues at both the Israelite and Early Bronze Age cities of Arad, sometimes producing fresh archeological discoveries.

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with the available measurements and possible photographs, but the original, which might easily have been salvaged, is lost. Although few would contest the importance of preserving ancient settlements, sites continue to be excavated, their treasures carted to museums, and their walls and buldings left first to crumble and finally vanish. Surely it is high time that archeologists recognized that preservation, if not restoration, is part of their basic responsibility when excavating a mound.

"•"

NOTE

Fig. 4. A reconstructed corner.

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

'During restoration, salvage operations were carried out by the Department of Antiquities and Tel-Aviv University, under the supervision of Professor Anson Rainey, Miriam Aharoni, and Zeev Herzog.

37

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The central figure, notable for his size, construction, and the fact that he has legs. His protruding eyes and ears add to his general grotesquerie. The double pipe he is playing is broken at the end.

THE

MUSICIANS OF

ASHDOD

MOSHE DOTHAN

A double flutist.

A (possibly female) cymbalist.

-J

I?A

38

MARCH

1977

TWO VIEWS OF THE 10th-CENTURY B.C. CULT VESSEL Encircled by Five Figures With Exaggeratedly Large Heads and Noses

Two pointed arches are cut into its cylindrical base. On parade above the musicians are three animals, partly intaglio, partly relief

The famouslyre-playerof Ashdod, 8th century,B.C. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

39

Book Reviews

John Dart, The Laughing Savior: The discovery and significance of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library.New York: Harper & Row. 154 pp. $7.95. John Dart, the religious editor of the Los Angeles 7imes, has written a delightful and informative book about the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, which came to light 30 years ago. This major discovery was overshadowed by the even more spectacular Dead Sea Scrolls, found at roughly the same time in caves near Qumran. Thanks to the unremitting efforts of an international group of scholars, however, the manuscriptshave been photographically reproduced and are being published responsibly under UNESCO supervision. Woven into the fabric of the present text are the two separate stories of the discovery itself and the complex, often frustrating and dismaying intrigues and manipulation seemingly designed as much to prevent the study and publication of the manuscripts as to promote them. As always, heroes and villains abound, but it is pleasant to report that in this story the heroes win. The great bulk of the material is available to scholars everywhere, and through their efforts to the public. Dart tells the story well, keeping his eye on the central figures and events, singling out Jean Doresse, the then young French expert in Coptic (the language of the codices), and James M. Robinson, the somewhat older and distinguished American scholar, for special commendation. As a reporter, Dart is at his best when he describes recent events and the interplay of this archeological and antiquarian story with politics and the military in Egypt and the Near East. The story of the contents of the documents and their place in the history of early Christianity, especially in the dramatic struggle between Catholic and Gnostic Christianity, is told simply and clearly, with the general reader in mind. Dart sketches in the backgound of the first centuries of the common era, when Catholic Christianity became established throughout the Roman Empire, and even beyond its borders, and at the same time was challenged by a multiplicity of groups who never achieved unity of organization, purpose, or program (as Dart points out, they proclaimed and practiced freedom and democracy-some would say anarchy-on the basis of the same gospels the Catholic Church used to erect an elaborate hierarchy). The challenge was formidable, and the issue was not finally resolved until Constantine and

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his successors mobilized the power of the Roman Empire behind the Catholic Church, which in turn offered its support to the imperial administration. Gnosticism was banished to the peripheryof the empire, lost its base in the intellectual, cultural, and religious life, and was forced underground,to continue a shadowy existence, surfacing from time to time in powerful dissident movements like the Cathari and Albigensians of the Middle Ages. The latter were suppressed in the most brutal fashion, demonstrating both the determination and the military power of the papacy, then at the peak of its authority. But Gnosticism has proved to be hydra-headed and extremely tenacious. It survives to this day in various philosophical and religious forms and has left a permanent mark on the spiritual life of man. Most recently, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of different stripes, but especially those influenced by C. J. Jung, have delved into Gnostic thought for clues to the inner workings of the human psyche, reviving both the symbols and ideas of those who participated in the early phases of the movement and left behind documents like those preserved at Nag Hammadi. Although without technical training in the skills required to unravel the documents, Dart undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of explaining to those unversed in the mysteries of Gnosticism what these mean, and how familiar biblical themes, drawn from both the Old and New Testaments, are woven into the rich mythological and philosophical tapestry of HellenisticRoman religious culture to produce a congeries of speculation about the pilgrimage of the soul from its earthly prison to its original and ultimate home in a heavenly Paradise. Gnosis, special knowledge for the initiate and the enlightened, is the key to salvation, but the way is narrow and the obstacles are well-nigh insurmountable. Dart provides a handy and helpful guide for the amateur, who can then use the concise bibliography of English books and articles to pursue the matter further. We recommend heartily to our readers this welcome account of one of the major discoveries of ancient literary materials. -David Noel Freedman N. Avigad, Archaeological Discoveries in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Israel Museum, 1976. Hebrew & English. After six years of excavation in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, an exhibit has been prepared by the Israel Museum to summarizethe resultsand present some of the finds. The publication under review, devised as a guidebook for the exhibit, is highly informative about the buildings and artifacts themselves and about the history of excavations in the area. Professor Avigad, the director of the dig, tells us in a running commentary that although the City of David, on the eastern hill of Old Jerusalem, and the Temple

MARCH1977

Mount have been excavated repeatedly over the past century, the Jewish Quarter on the western hill (i.e., the Upper City) has hardly been scratched. No serious archeological work was ever done there. The recent dig, however, could and did "reveal for the first time the history of settlement in the Upper City throughout the ages . . a study of the material culture . . in its various facets: urban planning, residential architecture . . . art, crafts, daily products--all of which determine the image of the city and the manner of living of its inhabitants." What has been learned is that in the earliest period of occupation (the Israelite Age [Iron II]: 8th to early 6th centuries B.C.E.), the area was enclosed within a massive city wall seven meters thick, remains of which, along with a massive, tower-like fortification, have survived. This part of the city must have been the mishneh or "second quarter"mentioned in the Bible. From the Babylonian destruction in 586 B.C.E. until the days of the Maccabees, this part of the city seems not to have been inhabited. The Herodian stratum (37 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.) is, however,extensivelypreserved,and the splendor of these remains is vividly and minutely illustrated. Of particular significance are the dwellings. One, the so-called Herodian House, the entire floor-plan of which is preserved, covered 200 sq. m. It was not destroyed in the fighting during the Jewish War but purposely demolished. A street paved with huge stone slabs was laid over it, later to become one of the major access roads to the Temple Mount. The most elegant of the houses has been named the Mansion; 600 m. in area, it has a central courtyard, frescoed walls, mosaic floors, and numerous pools and other plumbing. One of the artifacts found here was "a splendid glass vessel made by the well-known Phoenician craftsman Ennion." Further attesting to the wealth and status of the inhabitants of this portion of the Jewish Quarter is the "BurntHouse," filled with objects of stone. One, a weight, is inscribed "[Of] Bar Kathros" in Aramaic. Professor Avigad points out that the name Kathros is known from the Talmud as that of one of the high-priestly families, and infers that this Bar Kathros was a member of that group. Along with the buildings, mosaic pavements have been unearthed, the earliest of their kind in Jerusalem, and wall paintings far finer and more intricate than any hitherto discovered. Important among the small household objects are the pots, still soot-covered, showing that they were actually used for cooking, stone vessels in great quantity, testifying to the preoccupation with ritual cleanness, and a number of stone tables, the first ever to come to light in Israel. The pamphlet is generously illustrated with excellent photographs and drawings, which complement Avigad's magisterial text. Altogether, it is a splendid presentation, the next best thing to visiting the exhibition, or having lived in the Jewish Quarter at the time. -Evelyn T. Strouse BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

James B. Pritchard, et al., Solomon & Sheba. London: Phaidon Press and New York: Praeger, 1974. Pp. 160, with 63 photos and 15 drawings. $17.50. Six authors in search of the origins and developments of the Solomon-Sheba encounter in 1 Kings 10 and 2 Chronicles 9. Dr. Pritchard provides a portrayal of Solomon's court and of his "Golden Age." Gus W. van Beek writes on southern Arabia and the culture out of which the Queen of Sheba would have come. The remainder of the book then traces legends about the two monarchs through Judaic (Lou H. Silberman), Islamic (W. Montgomery Watt), Ethiopic (Edward Ullendorf), and Christian (Paul F. Watson) tradition. The subject is fascinating, and while Dr. Pritchard concludes by pointing out how little we know and how difficult it is to conclude anything as yet about the historicity of the encounter, simply to observe the growth of the tradition is illuminating. How could such a tale have developed in more conflicting ways than this one has! -Edward F. Campbell

Thomas R. Hester, Robert F. Heizer, and John A. Graham, Field Methods in Archaeology, 6th ed. Palo Alto, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1975. Pp. vii, 408, plans and photos. $9.95. The latest edition of a standard and highly readable manual written by New World archeologists and applying largely to that area. Nevertheless, a good many parts of this book are pertinent to Near Eastern archeology, especially its attention to site survey, to chronological methods, and to recording of data. People contemplating participation in excavation would benefit from it as from the latest edition of K. M. Kenyon's Beginning in Archaeology (1961 and reprints). -Edward F. Campbell

Benjamin Mazar, The Mountain of the Lord. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Pp. 303, with some 160 illustrations including 16 color plates. $30.00. This book is two things at once: it is both a handsome and well-illustrated compendium about Jerusalem for the general reader and a solid synthesis of all the archeological evidence found in and around Jerusalem by a man uniquely qualified to present the synthesis. Mazar, the eminent archeologist and teacher of archeologists, has conducted the large-scale excavation along the south and west sides of the temple precinct. This work has brought to light masses of new evidence about

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Herodian Jerusalem, together with new data on the Hasmoneans, on the tombs of the kings of Judah, and on the Byzantine and later cities. Mazar's own work makes its appearance hither and yon in this volume distributed among the results of dozens of previous and contemporary excavations. The book is arranged chronologically. This is not an easy book. But it is the best manual in English on its subject, both for general reader and specialist. -Edward F. Campbell Warren Kiefer, The Pontius Pilate Papers. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. 297 pp. $10.00. International finance and the international academic community joust in this surprisingly knowledgeable novel about an archeological discovery whose similarity to the Dead Sea Scrolls is surely no accident. As Jay Brian Marcus follows the threads which

New

Journals

at

link 2,000-year-old violence to modern murder, his own values shift as swiftly as the settings. For years Jay had led a tranquil, satisfying life as a gentleman scholar and dilettante digger at some of the world's great excavations, using both his medical training and his substantialwealth to pursue a passion for the past. He had endowed the Nathan Marcus Archeological Museum in Jerusalem, named after his distinguished grandfather, with part of the fortune left him by the old man, and divided the rest of his time between Paris and his yacht. But even as avowedly unorthodox a scientist as Jay is unpreparedfor the shocking chain of events which follows the discovery of some Roman papyri during the excavation of a luxury villa near the ruins of Caesarea. The Pontius Pilate Papers, as they come to be called, tell a good deal about the Roman persecution of the Jews and some unsavory details about the crucifixion of Christ. Oxford dons are called in alongside Tel Aviv policemen in a tale of what Publishers Weekly called "killersand scholars."In short, a treat for all admirers of Leon Uris and John Allegro. --John A. Miles, Jr.

Scholars

Press

Lonergan Workshop The essays collected in the inaugural volume of Lonergan Workshop were contributions for the third meeting of the Workshop held in June, 1976 at Boston College. As a group they express the way the work of Bernard Lonergan, to the extent that it has generated something like a "movement," is open to the most diverse styles of thought and directions of research. As director of the Worshop and editor of this journal, I would like to take this opportunity to stress that the intent of the Workshop-alive and in print-is to provide a forum for communication and ongoing collaboration among persons who have found Lonergan's suggestions about self-appropriation helpful in venturing out "on their own."

Fred Lawrence, Boston College, editor

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MARCH

1977

NEW FROM SCHOLARS PRESSFOR THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION

STUDIES IN RELIGION #15

George Rupp Culture-Protestantism:German LiberalTheology at the Turnof the Century

This study examines liberal religious thought in Germany during the three decades before World War I. Rupp argues for a criticalrehabilitationof the position that ErnstTroeltsch represents over against the stance illustratedin such figures as Wilhelm Herrmann and Adolf Von Harnack. ISBN 0-89130-197-6

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FriedrichSchleiermacher

James Duke and Jack Forstman, translators

Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts The first volume in the AARTexts and TranslationsSeries is a translationof Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics which provides the full complement of materialson hermeneutics written by Schleiermacher. Also included in the book are an essay on the development and significance of Schleiermacher's work by Heinz Kimmerle and an introduction by James Duke. ISBN 0-89130-186-0

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AIDS FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION#6

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RitaM. Gross,editor

Beyond Androcentrism: New Essayson Women and Religion Beyond Androcentrism is made up of essays exploring problems encountered in studying women and religion in various sub-disciplines within the academic study of religion. The several essays included attempt to assess the scope and significance of feminine imagery in constructs of ultimacy. ISBN 0-89130-196-8

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

LC 77-13312

Order #010306

43

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